


where the mount meets the sea

by goodnightpuckbunny



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst, Blow Jobs, Confessions, Developing Relationship, Friends With Benefits, Hand Jobs, Internalized Homophobia, Lack of Communication, M/M, Rimming, Sexual Improvement, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-31
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2018-11-07 04:26:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 53,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11051301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodnightpuckbunny/pseuds/goodnightpuckbunny
Summary: When it comes to Geno, Sid can’t help but break the rules.





	1. and that's how it starts

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you _so much_ to [saintroux](http://archiveofourown.org/users/saintroux) for editing this work; for being patient, for expanding all my contractions, and for helping me figure out the sex mechanics that worked better in my head.
> 
> Thank you to those who have been reading this fic since I started writing it. Thank you to those who are just finding it now.
> 
>  **Note:** because of language barriers and a lack of healthy sexual choices, Sid and Geno don't discuss their sexual relationship either at the beginning nor as it develops. If this is something that bothers you, please click away. 
> 
> ***WORK OF FICTION***

Things with Geno are working out really well. He hasn’t been in Pittsburgh long, but already those few months have felt like magic to Sid.

It’s not just that Geno is great at hockey.  His style of play, his natural competitiveness, his passion—it all inspires Sid to improve his own game. Sid is convinced in no time at all that Geno’s presence among the Penguins will lead to a better team, a better hockey, and, therefore, a better Sid.

Geno comes off as shy when he’s in an unfamiliar situation—which is pretty much all the time—but there’s a spark in him. He’s dazzling when he steps onto the ice and Sid finds it just about irresistible.

Well, there are a lot of things about Geno that Sid really likes. It’s not _just_ the hockey.

When Geno arrived in Pittsburgh in September, he was drawn with the thick-weighted lines of exhaustion, but jittery all the same as he shifted the bag of his only possessions on his shoulder. He stooped a little in Mario’s doorway—trying to make himself seem unimposing—and when Sid thinks back on it he feels a thrill of protectiveness for that soft-eyed, nervous version of Geno.

Back then, Geno could speak only a handful of words in English: yes or no, thank you, and most of the hockey lexicon. His diction hasn’t improved much, but it’s almost as if Sid can understand Geno through body language alone. Sid can see it in Geno’s eyes, the tilt of his neck, the way he squares his shoulders.  

Sid takes to instituting post-skate passing practice with Geno any day they don’t have a game. Gonch gets to take an hour for himself instead of playing translator and host, and Sid gets to work on something with Geno that doesn’t involve English language skills.

On the ice, Geno is beautiful. His hands are silky with the puck. He flips a pass to Sid, and Sid sends it back, a little more delightedly breathless every time. The connections reverberate through his body. Sid is thunderstruck.

"Yes! Geno!" Sid cries, after Geno slides him a particularly tricky pass that will probably never work in a real game, but is still thrilling to receive. It feels like it might be a taste of their future success, and Sid hasn't felt this hopeful about hockey in ages.

"Beauty!" Geno calls back to him, a hockey compliment he learned to parrot early on.

Sid saucers the puck back to him. "Again," he demands and smacks his stick against the ice.

The pass doesn't work the same a second time, but that's why they're out here. The coaches and trainers have told them to stop sneaking onto the ice after practice, that they should be working off any excess energy they have in the weight room or on the bikes, but something about coming out here, just the two of them, is starting to feel sacred.

Sid imagines a future where he and Geno can play a game that's all instinct. They aren't there yet, but he hopes and prays that it won't take long. Passing practice is a mixed bag for now, but he can see them improving every time they go out.

They work on tape-to-tape passes until Sid can predict Geno’s movements. They do drop passes and bounces off the wall until they don’t have to look at each other to do it. At the end of their practice, they alternate one-timers at the empty net, and when their shoulders are tired and their stomachs are growling audibly they call it a day.

The locker room is nice without all the guys in it, sometimes. If nothing else, it certainly smells better.

Geno strips out of his practice gear without saying anything, but his good mood is fairly palpable, humming a song Sid doesn't recognize. Sid grins back at him.

Geno’s pants drop that long distance to the floor and he reaches to unfasten the clips of his garter, causing his socks to slide down of their own accord, revealing snow-pale skin between shorts and shin guards. Sid watches as Geno tip his head to drink from his green Gatorade bottle, and sweat from the exertion of practice traces its silvery trail down his neck.

Sid doesn’t know where he got the impression that he’d have fewer embarrassing, inconvenient boners once he got to the NHL, but it’s certainly false.

This year, especially—now that he’s stronger and not constantly exhausted by the schedule and the training and everything else—he hasn’t been able to just stave off an erection by attending to his more pertinent needs of food and sleep. Now it takes actually doing something about it to make them go away. He’s a frequent visitor to the bathroom stall furthest from the door. He doesn’t want to contemplate what he’d rather the guys assume he’s doing in there.

But Geno is standing _right there_ , and Sid can’t exactly waddle his way to the bathroom in his pads.

He hopes Geno’s attention is directed elsewhere, and debates whether he should rush through jerking off or just take a long cold shower. He whips his jersey off, the pads, the pants, the socks, the jock, and then he figures he can make it to the shower room without flashing too much if he walks quickly and angles the front of his compression shorts away from Geno.

Except his luck runs out and he collides with Geno in his haste. Geno puts a steadying hand on his shoulder, and Sid thinks desperately, with his breath caught in his throat: _don’t look down_.

Of course, Geno does. And smiles.

Sid’s mind scrambles for an excuse, a creative lie in simple terms to offer Geno. It wasn’t necessarily _Geno_ and his body which was cause for the erection, he reasons with himself. Everything has the potential to set him off—a win against the Flyers, the accidental brush of the cashier’s hand at Giant Eagle, even just a _really_ good slice of cake.

He once popped a semi because someone told him Roll Up The Rim was back—although, granted, that was quite some time ago. Sid has no idea how to communicate all of that to Geno—that he’s always passively horny until his brain catches on something exciting, that hopefully he'll grow out of his proclivity for embarrassing erections sometime in his early twenties or preferably sooner.

Thankfully, he doesn’t end up having to explain at all.

“You like?” Geno makes a motion with his hand, one that’s probably universal. Sid doesn’t know if he means jerking off or handjobs, but the answer is the same either way.

“Yes,” he blurts before he can think better of it, feeling his cheeks go tight with red-hot heat. It's the truth, anyways, and it's not like denial would be any better. “Do you? Like it?” His voice slips out high and breathy. It’s embarrassing, but the only other option is to giggle until he sinks right through the floor.

Geno makes a considering expression and then nods, a slow goofy grin spreading over his face. Alright. Sid definitely gets the humor here. Of _course_ he likes it. _Obviously_ , Sid reads in Geno’s eyes, heavy with something like intent. He steps forward, and Sid steps back, until Sid’s knees hit the seat of his stall. Geno’s hand meets Sid’s dick through his compression shorts, the stroke unmistakable in its meaning.

Sid could back away, could run and let his own shame bully him into pretending nothing ever happened.

And yet he doesn’t want to be anywhere else in the world. All of his attention is spiraling down into the heat of Geno’s palm against him. It feels electric.

“Yes?” Geno asks, running his tongue across his lips.

Sid’s never done this in a locker room before. In the past, it’s been by the dim light of hotel lamps, the pitch dark backseat of a teammate’s car, the flicker of street lights speeding past the team bus.

The slick sound of skin on skin still haunts his dreams whether he wants it to or not. But he knows the rules for a tryst like this.

Hands only. Don’t look at their dick. Don’t look in their eyes. Don’t moan, don’t say anything, and definitely don’t talk about it afterwards.

Sid sits down in his stall, and Geno slumps into the one next to him with his legs spread lasciviously, close enough to touch when they turn towards each other. Scrambling to undress, Sid tucks the waistband of his shorts under his balls and barely registers the discomfort once his dick is finally free. There’s nothing nearby that would substitute for lube, so Sid spits into hand twice, and then brings his cupped palm to where Geno has pulled out his own erection. Sid only looks to see where his hand is going—sees flesh and dark hair—and smears his spit down Geno’s length.

The sound Geno makes is a deep, contented hum. Sid closes his eyes for a second so he can deal with the heat that flushes through him, makes the hair on his neck stand on end. There’s something about doing this for a teammate that Sid relishes; a thrill in discovering the dozens of little ways he can bring them off with only his touch. Geno’s cock swells in his hand, just this side of fully hard. Sid opens his eyes and fixates on the exit sign hung above the locker room door, the red glow of it a welcome distraction.

Geno’s hand grips Sid’s dick, dry and firm, a heady rush of too-much-already. Fuck. _Fuck._ It's been a long time since Sid has done this. His breath stutters, but he keeps the instinctive moan locked beneath his tongue.

Sid’s focus returns a beat later, and he strokes his hand up Geno’s dick, hot and thick in his palm. Geno pants wetly as Sid jacks his dick, twisting on the upstroke and catching the slick at the head, collecting it in the join between thumb and forefinger. He’s getting so obscenely wet that Sid can’t help but feel the echoes of arousal in his own cock where Geno’s strokes are somewhat perfunctory, yet more than enough for Sid.

Sid keeps his pace, jacking Geno's cock with firm intent. He wonders what Geno is thinking about. Does he keep his mind completely blank or think of someone else? Is he like Sid, concentrating on technique and the confidence boost of doing a good job? Sid clenches his hand, grip tight all the way down.

Suddenly, Geno is coming with a punched-out, “Uh!” and then a long sigh, spilling over Sid’s fist, the tremors in his hips thrusting his dick through the ring of Sid’s fingers. Sid feels warm, smugly delighted that he was the one with the boner, but he got Geno to come first.

That flush of satisfaction probably carries him along, because once Geno has stopped pulsing and Sid takes his hand away, it doesn’t take Sid long, either.

Geno tugs on Sid’s dick with renewed focus, and it’s still not a particularly stellar effort, but Sid’s easy. He’s had less help before and still made it work. Geno, at least, seems intent on making Sid come. Sid imagines Geno says as much when he mutters something lowly in Russian.

Geno’s hand moves in short pumps and his breath is still coming out in tense little huffs, like he's just returned from a long shift. It’s a lot of friction, and Sid thinks, momentarily, if he could just bring his hand to join, still dirty and slippery-wet from Geno’s cock, Geno’s _come_ —

That’s all it takes. Sid comes, curling in on himself as his orgasm shudders through him, the force of it making his eyes clench shut. He unspools a bit only when Geno lets him go; and his dick spurts once, weakly, when it’s no longer being held.  

The bright tingling in his body drains just as suddenly as it arrived. He’s soft now, and his untimely erection has been dealt with.  He feels anything but satisfied.

Sid sits up slowly, kind of embarrassed and kind of annoyed, and makes the mistake of turning his head towards Geno. Geno is looking at him. His gaze is—hungry, maybe. Sid doesn’t understand it, but if Geno wants another handjob, well, Sid could probably oblige.

“Thank,” Geno says, voice rough, “Good?”

“Um. Yeah,” Sid replies, feeling like Geno’s eyes are burning  right through him.

And then Geno leans in, his eyes close, and fuck, shit—Geno is going to kiss him.

Sid practically jumps out of his stall to avoid it, heart crashing up against his ribs. Kissing isn’t part of this. It’s just some stress relief between teammates. They’re just doing each other a favor. A kiss is not a favor, it’s—something else, entirely. Sid can’t—Sid can’t do that.

Geno blinks up at him. “Sid?” He asks.

“Sorry. That’s not,” Sid stutters, shoving his limp dick back into his shorts, feeling his come squelch against the fabric. “No. I’m.” How can he explain that? _I’m not gay, don’t kiss me._ That’s simple enough, but the words get stuck in his throat. "Sorry," he croaks again.

Sid makes a break for the showers instead, scrambling out of his clothes when he gets there.

His breath is strangled. It was just a miscommunication, probably. Maybe in Russia kissing is fine in this situation, or maybe something about Sid made Geno think it was okay. Sid has heard lots of chirping about the perceived plushness of his mouth.Geno could have been merely curious, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but.

Sid cranks the cold water in the shower and lets the bite of it clear his head, calm his racing heartbeat. He drags a hand down his face. The rules are in place, mostly unspoken, for plausible deniability. Someone else’s hand is a replacement for his own. It's like jerking off. It falls under a category similar to guys leaning against each other on the bus for a pre-game nap. It's not entirely removed from late-night philosophical talks in hotel beds when it's far past curfew.

Sure, Sid has maybe transitioned from those more wholesome activities into shoving his hand down someone’s pants, but _kissing._ Kissing stays firmly in its own box: love, romance, even just sex. Sid has enjoyed what experience he’s had kissing girls. It’s not something he’s about to share with his teammates.

He clings to the rule against talking about it with desperation. He won’t talk about it with Geno. He doesn’t have to actually say _I’m not gay, don’t kiss me._ Things will just—work themselves out.

Under the icy spray, Sid counts tiles until he calms down. When Geno comes in for his own shower, Sid tries valiantly to ignore his presence across the room.

Except his mind keeps flashing back to Geno’s panting breaths and his dry hand, and Sid thinks it could be a lot better with the shower water and the body wash from the dispenser on the wall. The grip that Geno used would be perfect with a little wetness. Sid’s had practice and that’s clearly what Geno needs. Sid is more than happy to volunteer for the cause, especially if it helps to release some of the tension he’s still carrying in his hips that he knows has only one solution.

They’re all alone in the locker rooms. There’s no obligations for the rest of the day.

Sid turns and Geno is already looking back at him, his gaze molten as he drags it over Sid's naked body. Sid glances down at where Geno’s hand wraps around his cock, robed in suds and red, wet, hard again.

Well.

Fuck it, right?

And that’s how it starts.

* * *

 Sid tries to be a good support system for Geno in Pittsburgh. He’s carefully patient with Geno’s English, takes his passes, praises him to the media, gives him suggestions on the bench. He tours Geno around the town on off-days and invites him to dinner to practice stilted conversation. They’re not precisely friends, but not solely teammates either.

Sid still gets hard at the sound of Geno’s grunt when Sid knocks him into the boards during practice. Sid wakes up with sticky sheets and Geno’s phantom grip on his cock more often than is appropriate or convenient. He gets goosebumps in the wake of every casual touch, or when he senses Geno marching behind him as they make their way to the ice.

They have to be pretty careful, and after that first day there aren’t many opportunities to fool around. The team is always there, and neither of them can spend more than just a few minutes alone together at a time. That’s how it is, but Sid craves more than just rushed handjobs. He wants to take his time with it and learn how to make it really _good_ for Geno, no matter how flattering it is that Sid can bring him to orgasm in a matter of strokes.

At the same time, he’s worried.

Worried that he’ll mess up, that he'll look at Geno in the middle of it and be unable to look away, that he’ll moan something incriminating. He’s worried even more so that he’ll soon be the one to lean over and capture Geno’s lips, to lick the hitching breaths right from his mouth.

The thought of all of it leaves Sid coiled with tension the second they have a spare moment, calculating Geno’s every movement and sound, and it’s getting harder for him to relax afterwards.

Sid always wants _more_ , wants longer, wants harder. He wants to push until Geno’s body gives it up for him because he can’t just _ask_.

But if they stick to the rules, they’ll be fine.

Sid can definitely stick to the rules.

 


	2. push off and sink

After a long summer filled with seeing his old friends and hanging out with Taylor, Sid returns to Pittsburgh for training camp. He’s restless with nerves, but they melt away like snow in spring once he feels his steel hit Southpointe ice. Sid is thrilled to see the team, to greet the welcome array of coaches, old friends, new trades, and big-show hopefuls.

With the C on his chest, Sid knows he has to work harder than ever. The challenge of it makes him a little desperate for the season to just _begin already_ , but he makes himself enjoy every moment. He doesn’t want it to look like he’s anything less than ecstatic about his new responsibilities. It’s a familiar routine: shoving the bubbling panic into his hands and his feet, turning his anxiety into focus and drive, transforming his nerves into strength.

It’s strange to see Geno. Sid barely heard from him all summer—only an errant photo message or two coming through—but he looks great; his skin, his eyes, his smile. Sid finds himself tracking Geno’s movements, wishing a little that he could just reach out and brush his fingers along Geno’s tan lines.

The near radio silence did nothing to quell Sid’s thoughts about Geno’s dry palms or the quickening of his breath just before he comes. Sid spent endless hours counting six rosy, gossamer-draped memories. Even if he cherished them all over and over, fisting his own slick cock in the humid Nova Scotian nighttime, he knows he can do way better than that. Six times in seven months is nothing but a drop in the ocean.

But now Geno is back from Russia and bubbling over with increased confidence. He’s cracking more jokes in the locker room, and Sid finds himself helplessly laughing along to every poorly-translated chirp. His gaze follows Geno everywhere.  No matter how many times he tries to look elsewhere, he keeps catching Geno watching him back, his gaze sweet and slow like honey.

After the first day of camp, they’re all exhausted. Sid eats his weight in lasagna and crashes into his bed at Mario’s, sated, at least for now, by the prospect of a fresh season’s worth of hockey.

The second day goes much the same, only this time it’s his favorite of Nathalie’s roasts that he’s tucking into during dinner.

Afterward, Sid retires upstairs looking to burn off the residual energy pooling low in his gut, but the second he’s stripped he remembers that he still hasn’t been able to brave buying any actual lube.  The industrial sized bottle of lotion his mom had placed into his duffle over the summer stares at him from atop the dresser.  It will have to do.

It’s the sensation of being over-slicked that really gets him going, reminds him of the drip of precome leaking from the crown of Geno’s dick. He looks at his own cock, flushed as it slips through his grip, and he wonders a little.

He knows he hasn’t really _seen_ it—eyes always carefully averted—but Geno's cock probably doesn’t look much different . Thicker, of course. Maybe its own unique shade of blushy pink. But even with the _sounds_ of his dick running slick through the tunnel of his fingers, he’s missing Geno’s gasp, the warmth of him nearby. Sid thinks of how Geno was always the first to come, the way his hips would twitch and his shaky sigh—and suddenly Sid is spilling wet over his own fist.  It’s an absolute mess.

On the third day, the team is back in working condition, and they want to want to go out when camp ends for the night. Some of the older guys beg off, but about fifteen of them squeeze into a handful of booths in the back of a bar downtown. Teammates float in and out of the gauzy privacy curtains all night, bouncing between rounds of shots at the table and wooing the girls hanging around the bar with varying levels of success.Sid feels his heart beating in his throat every time Geno glances his way. He keeps company with Tanger and Duper and Flower, laughs at their summer stories, their bad jokes, their lovingly-crafted insults.  His eyes stray towards Geno every time he departs to the main bar—Geno is twenty-one this year and making the best of it, wildly determined to any strange cocktail concoction his teammates suggest. Sid has been half-hard since he watched the first shot slide past Geno’s lips.

Sid is so charmed by the thought of slipping away to make the best of the night with Geno, that between alternating flashes of fantasy and desire, Sid almost misses him coming back to the next table over. But judging by the way he looks—flushed with confidence, loose, relaxed—Geno could hold the anyone’s attention like it was nothing.

“So? How’d it go?” Talbot asks Geno, with a hearty elbow to his side. Several of the other guys lean in.

Geno shrugs, feigning nonchalance, and steals Talbot’s bottle of beer for a swig. He swallows and Sid follows the movement down as far as he can. Duper is saying something, but Sid isn’t listening.

Finally, Geno speaks up. “Got her number,” he says with a wolfish grin.

The guys all jeer and Talbo reaches over to punch him in the arm.  Geno laughs and shoves them all away as they congratulate him, his smile turning a bit bashful at the center of it all.

Sid has an achy feeling crawling up from his chest, which is not unlike disappointment. He bites his tongue and then tries to swallow the feeling down. It doesn’t work.

* * *

Sid is spending all of his road nights watching _Friends_ reruns and eating a lot of pizza outside of the monthly allowance in his diet plan.

“We’re just a little worried about you, Creature,” Army says, the very picture of discomfort with his arms crossed, and toeing at the grey-beige of the hotel carpet. After a 3-2 loss to the Islanders, Sid is less than keen to go out. Everything he needs is right here.

“I’m totally fine,” Sid says, and then adds for good measure, “I think Mario’s kids might have picked up some kind of bug from school. It’s better if I stay here and sleep it off before I give everyone a cold.”

“It’s healthier to be out with the boys. Builds relationships, you know? We’ll even put a hat on you and no one will bother you all night.” Army says, and Sid levels him with a look meant to convey how unimpressed he is, and not how tired he feels. He can't tell if he pulls it off. Probably not. “C’mon, you’re not the biggest celebrity in NYC.”

“No _thanks_ , Army,” Sid says. “I’m not interested. I’ll have a great time here, seriously.”

Army doesn’t look like he believes Sid even a little bit, but Sid doesn’t care so long as it gets Army out of his hair.

He eventually leaves, tossing his hands up in exasperation, muttering something that sounds suspiciously like _mopey kids these days_ , and Sid is left to the peace of his temporary abode. Sid lets the familiar plot flashing by on television numb him and he drifts in the memories of the game. What could they have done better? What could _S_ _id_  have done better?

He starts thinking of the rest of the team, correcting shots and passes and hits in his mind.  Inevitably, his thoughts come to rest on Geno.

It’s been two months and Sid still feels embarrassed. He was fucking foolish, if he’s being honest with himself. The point of the no-strings, just-teammates, locker-room handjobs was that they were only to relieve pent up frustration and never to become anything emotional. What was he _jealous_ for? What business did he have being anything but grateful for those precious six times they fucked around?

Besides, if anyone had found out, they’d both be branded as pariahs. It’s safer this way.

Sid is trying to make playing with Geno work, regardless of his silly hang-ups. For the most part, it seems to be going ok. Geno is a phenomenal player. They should be able to work together professionally, no problem. Yet sometimes Sid looks at Geno on the plane or in the weight room, and he feels a little hopeless.

The whole situation isn’t great, but Sid will get over it. He has to.

He just wishes he felt like he was standing on solid ground instead of relying on the quicksand uncertainty of people and their ever-changing minds.

The episode of _Friends_ ends and some late-night talk show begins. Sid switches the channel until he finds a different episode and picks up his phone to order a pepperoni-mushroom. He’s got his constants: hockey, pizza, _Friends_ reruns, and the starchy white sheets of a thousand roadtrip beds. For now he’ll have to use them as his touchstone for normalcy.

* * *

 Geno gets his first hat trick in a 6-2 win against Toronto at home, and Sid doesn’t even have a word for how proud he is. He got the assist on two of them, so it hadn’t been  a bad night, all told.

_Understatement._

Sid spends extra time on the bike, wired from the night’s spoils.

He’s also kind of avoiding the inevitable bar romp that the guys are definitely planning for Geno. Tomorrow, he’ll see if Geno wants to get lunch to celebrate, but the prospect of having to endure a dozen teammates all trying to wingman Geno into a hat trick’s worth of blowjobs seems less than appealing.

Eventually, pedaling away on the bike will turn Sid’s legs to satisfying jelly and he can go home and sleep like the dead. He just keeps going, waiting for the noise around the players’ rooms to dissipate or the static in his head to clear. Whatever happens first.

Sid takes a break for a drink, sticking his water bottle under the sink faucet in the lounge. He wets his hands and runs them over his face and neck, the coolness feeling like a luxury. Showering again can probably be held off until morning—he’s not particularly sweaty, just pleasantly hot all over. Sid is half-tempted to strip off his shirt and flop onto the nearest cold surface. Instead, he walks back to the bikes—sipping slowly at his water—and hears his footsteps echo all the way down the hallway. The sound is both eerie and comforting.

Halfway there, he sees Geno coming towards him, probably on his way out. Sid sometimes wishes he could just nod and pass when he’s in this kind of a mood, but tonight Geno deserves far more than that. So Sid lifts his hand in greeting. “Hey, Geno. You better be doing something fun tonight.”

Geno’s answering smile is a little bashful and Sid honestly loves when Geno gets like that, long eyelashes fanning against his cheeks. It makes Sid wants to compliment him until Geno ducks his head bashfully to hide his blush.

Geno looks up and down the hallway, searching. Then he turns back to Sid, grabs him by the sleeve of his shirt, and drags him into the nearest doorway.

Sid stumbles into what he thinks is one of the trainers’ spare rooms.  When Geno closes the door behind them and clicks the lock, the only light left inside is the fluorescent glow of the computer’s screensaver. Sid can see the barest edge of Geno’s face, a pale outline of forehead, cheek, jaw. His heart jumps right out of his chest and into his throat, and Sid croaks, “Geno, what—”

Geno pushes Sid up against the door and boxes him in, both arms on either side of Sid's shoulders. “Sid,” he says lowly, his face so close, and Sid can barely breathe, “play best.”

“Yeah,” Sid agrees—his voice an unsteady murmur—and he feels the puffs of air bouncing between their mouths, “you were awesome.”

“No,” Geno says, irritation colouring the word, “ _you_ play best.”

Sid laughs a little. Out of all of them, Geno was the one who was superb tonight. When you get a hat trick it makes you automatically the best—the privilege of the night's winner.

Sid’s assists were alright, but it’s not like he scored. He hasn’t since mid-December, but he’s trying not to let it bother him.  At least the team is on something of a streak.  He opens his mouth to explain as much, but the words fall right out of his mouth when Geno puts his hand on the waist of Sid’s shorts—on the drawstring.

Geno pulls the loose end of the bow and then slides the shorts down. He pulls Sid’s cock free and Sid is helpless to stop the noise of desperation he makes.

“Uh,” Sid says, “ _um._ ”

Then Geno spits into his palm and when he wraps it around Sid’s dick, Sid is already half hard. The wetness is so good. That’s Geno’s spit and it’s filthy, fuck, to have that smeared onto him where he’s vulnerable and quaking. Sid’s hips stutter and his cock slides a little through the grasp of Geno's hand.

“Hm?” Geno asks, and Sid can feel his smirk.

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” Sid clarifies, his own breath bouncing back at him, “yeah that’s—good, so good.” He wants to rub himself all over Geno until they’re both drenched in lust and sweat. Instead, he fumbles for the button of Geno’s trousers.

It doesn’t escape Sid’s notice that this time Geno twists his hand around Sid’s cock—an improvement on his technique from the season before. It isn’t as tight as Sid would like, but it’s more than he could ask for.

Sid loses his train of thought twice while trying to figure out how the fuck pants work again, so it takes him a moment to repay the favor. The inside of Geno’s underwear is a little slick, most of his precome pooled at the head of his cock.  Sid slicks his fingers through it, and starts jacking Geno in the best way he knows how—fast and rough.

“Yes,” comes Geno’s encouragement, and it sounds just as hot to Sid’s ears as Geno’s hand does on Sid’s dick.

Sid feels his abdomen flexing—balls drawing up—and he manages to ruck his shirt up just in time. Then he’s coming, trying not to shout. His toes curl inside his shoes as his come splatters over his stomach.

His hand is no longer moving on Geno’s cock, lax until he returns to Earth and gathers his breath. As it is, he’s gulping for hot, humid air.

Geno holds his hand up to Sid’s face. Sid can’t see, exactly, but he knows there’s probably some come that missed his stomach and dribbled onto Geno’s fingers. There’s nowhere to dispose of it, exactly; the laundry basket for towels is probably empty. But Geno’s hand is right there and Sid can smell his own release.  And—well—Geno _did_ get a hat trick, so Sid can maybe—

Sid’s gut clenches with something like shame but also with a swooping thrill, and Sid licks Geno’s fingers, sucks the come from them. He tastes salt and bitterness and— _Christ_ —Geno’s spit was on that hand too. Regardless, it’s not the worst thing he’s tasted, and he loves the way Geno’s breathing goes ragged when he curls his tongue around Geno’s ring finger.

He keeps cleaning Geno’s hand with his mouth, even after all that he tastes is skin.  The hand still wrapped around Geno’s dick is wet where Geno is leaking steadily over the head, and Sid resets his mind to getting Geno off.

Geno comes quickly, with a grunt and a long, contented sigh. Sid scoops up as much come and slick as he can with one hand and wipes it on his own stomach, rubbing a little so he can pull his shirt back down over the mess. He sucks the flavor off his own hand, too, and watches Geno go wide-eyed at the sight.

His fingertips are a little wrinkled, but the taste is nearly the same.

Should he start carrying condoms around so there’s less of a mess if this happens again? The thought of being so blatant about it starts a little fire in his gut, but it’s doused when he remembers that this is an oddity, now. Geno seemingly isn’t interested in the same way he was last season.

Sid swallows and tucks himself away.

When Sid pulls the door back open and the hallway lights come flooding in, the smile Geno shoots at him makes him not want to look away. Sid doesn't think he has any evidence of what they've just done on his suit, but he feels utterly debauched and dirty nonetheless.

“Best,” Geno says again, and Sid thinks: _not yet_.

* * *

 “You need a girlfriend or something,” Tanger tells him, and points at Sid with one of his ketchupy fries for emphasis.

Sid rolls his eyes. Yeah, _or something_ , for sure. “I’m good, thanks.”

“It’s making all of us depressed. You’ve got half of Canada and all of Pittsburgh knocking on your door, man, and all you say is ‘no, sorry.’”

Tanger is exaggerating, of course. The attention is mostly a distraction. Girls are usually only interested in him because he’s rich or famous or both. And he likes them well enough—how they smile at him like they've got a plan, the way they tuck their hair behind their ears and smile up at him through their long, sweeping eyelashes and pout their painted lips when he begs off early.

There’s never any shortage of beautiful women. Hockey players tend to go after a certain kind of girl, but Sid wouldn’t have to. He’s got plenty of options.

“I go on dates,” Sid protests, thinking of last week when he got dinner with the daughter of one of the ladies who works in the Pens’ accounting department. It hand been bland, but overall a nice night. Sid doesn’t plan on seeing her again.

Tanger calls him something rude in French. “Fuck you. That shit’s practically PR.”

“Fuck _you_ ,” Sid replies. “How am I supposed to know any relationship I have is real?”

Tanger doesn’t have an answer for that because none of them do, not in the fledgling stages of a romance. “I’m just saying. Someone to take care of you, that’s all.” He pairs it with a salacious wink, the romance evaporating right out of the conversation.

Sid consoles himself with the fact that he’s only twenty. If he feels impatient, that’s normal, and at least partially because most of the personal questions he gets from reporters are about if he’s found a ‘nice Pittsburgh girl’ yet.  

He doubts he'll find anyone here, but at the same time, he couldn’t expect anyone from back home to follow him to the U.S. when he’s not even _around_ most of the time. He’d have to move out of the Lemieux place if he got a girlfriend. He’d have to keep track of special occasions and go out on all his off-days. He’d have to do a lot of things that make him uncomfortable.

“I’ll find someone eventually,” Sid says, “I’m just not really looking right now.”

“What’d I miss?” Flower asks, coming back from the bathroom, wiping his palms against his jeans. He steals one of the baby tomatoes from Sid’s salad and pops it in his mouth.

“Our _capitaine_ is lying about how badly he needs a lady.” Tanger smirks, waiting for the interjection of Sid’s indignant spluttering.

“Aw, leave him alone, Kris,” Flower says. “He’s just shy. No one ever taught him to wheel—so sad.”

Sid chews a fork-load of lettuce and glares at the two, imagining a world where no one cares about his relationship status.

* * *

 Sid is with the team at this bar in Buffalo mostly because his ankle is fucked up and all he can do is light exercise and socializing. It sucks for him, but the guys are all in buoyant moods after winning against the Sabres. The bar is sufficiently crowded for a Sunday night, and though their group is holding down a few tables, most of the single guys are out on the dance floor. And Sid, well.

In one way, it’s to get the French Canadians off his case, but it's also to scratch the itch that the last month of sitting and watching has left him with. He’s trying to talk to some girls. Women. Ladies?

It’s going pretty poorly.  Despite Buffalo being a bit of a hockey town, nobody here seems to care who he is.

The relative anonymity is great for Sid’s energy because he can only deal with so many girls asking him to sign their cleavage and wondering aloud how good his stick-handling is off the ice. On the other hand, he has practically no ability to attract attention when he doesn’t have hockey to lean on. He has no game—or so the guys are always telling him—though it’s been plenty evident in his success for the past hour. The girls he talks to are supposedly his type—blonde, athletic, and shorter than him. Yet after the fourth one rejects him, pats his arm with a pitying smile and says she “doesn’t go for the whole doe-eyed, innocent, impressionable kind,” Sid retreats.

He suffers through the pats on the back and, for once, wishes he could drown his sorrows with alcohol and just get messy. The big sharpie X the doorman penned onto the back of his hand says he’s out of luck, though. Actually, he probably shouldn’t mix his painkillers with booze.

“No girl?” Geno asks, sliding into the booth next to Sid. He has to shout to be heard above the pounding music.

Sid sighs. “No. It’s okay.”

Geno frowns at him, then out at the crowd, then back at him. He leans in close so his words are just between the two of them. “Go to hotel? Fun for us; good night still.”

Well, yes. Sid wants that. It’s been quite a while since that occasion in the trainer’s room, but Sid is always up for it, even if he’s reluctant to ask. “Sure,” he says, and nods for good measure.

They get the hell out of there.

It’s been seven times now, but they’ve never been horizontal, much less in a bed together. Sid tries to take it slow, their pants around their knees, lying on their sides facing each other with the comforter shoved to the end of the bed. He’s memorizing the weight, the thickness, the slick texture of Geno’s cock as best he can because he doesn’t know when the next time he touches it will be. The angle sucks and it’d be better if he could _see_ , but Geno is staring into his eyes and he can’t look away.

There’s something Geno’s trying to tell him. Sid can tell there’s a conversation in Geno's gaze, a confession. He can’t read it, just like he can’t always figure out what Geno is trying to say with words. All he knows is what the rhythm of Geno’s breathing means. Sid can see the rise and fall of his chest and hear how it catches when Sid twists his wrist just-so.

“Sid,” Geno says and Sid gasps. The contact is too much. It’s burning through him like the winding fuse of a powder keg. “Sid, I—I’m—“

Whatever Geno is trying to say, Sid is afraid to hear it.

He lets himself make a noise—a genuine groan—and even though it’s quiet, it distracts Geno sufficiently enough that his hand tightens around Sid’s cock.

“That’s it,” Sid encourages. The sounds between them are wet and Geno, when he pants with an open mouth, flashes the shiny pink of his tongue. And Sid wants. Sid wants.

Sid wants to be closer. But he can’t.

_Slow down_ , he wants to tell Geno. _Hurry_.

All he can do is lose himself in the roughness of Geno’s hand.

When Sid comes, he thinks he’s beaten a personal record for Geno-related stamina. Not that ten whole minutes is all that impressive.

Geno follows right after, keeping his eyes on Sid for as long as he can, until he’s spilling himself and squeezing his eyes shut on something resembling a shout. He shakes as Sid keeps stroking him past his orgasm.

Everything he does is fascinating to Sid. He wonders if he could make Geno really swear, maybe even in Russian. Sid bets it would be hot as fuck to watch Geno lose it like that.

“For you,” Geno says when Sid lets him go, voice raspy like wind through wheat. Geno’s chest is heaving. “If you want. Any—any times is good.”

Sid can see the truth of it in his eyes and it hits him like a big punch to the center of his chest. He should be asking what happened to Geno’s girl from the bar back home—to any of the girls, because there’s been more than one—but he doesn’t really want to know. Instead he clings to that offer like a life preserver. As much as Sid is afraid to admit it, he wants more than a handful of times if Geno is willing.

It doesn’t have to mean anything to either of them, but something inside Sid cracks and spills anyway.

Geno reaches out to anchor Sid’s jaw in his warm palm, leans towards him, closes his eyes, and with that, the thoughts that had kept Sid spellbound fizzle and evaporate. He’s scooting out of bed and into the bathroom with barely a muttered excuse.

Under the unforgiving lights above the bathroom mirror, Sid stares back at his own panicked expression. He let himself get carried away, but there are rules in place for a reason. He has to keep an appropriate emotional distance from Geno because they’re both safer that way. Sid can’t feel anything for Geno. He _doesn’t_ feel anything for Geno. And if he did, well, he’d have to cut it off.

He doesn’t want to stop what they’re doing though, so Sid really only has one choice.

Sid gets his breathing under control and works up the courage to send Geno back to his own room—away from their temporary, foolish closeness—but when he opens the door, Geno has already gone.

 


	3. the will of the eastern winds

It sucks.

This is the closest he’s come and—God, it’s fucking miserable.

After the game, nobody feels much like talking or doing anything, Sid very much included. Luckily, the media is mostly focused on the Red Wings partying down the hall. Sid is glad he can’t hear the celebration over the pound of water against his head.

It’s probably not healthy to stay in the shower this long, nor is it something a mature captain should be doing.  Sid can’t seem to muster the energy to care.

Sid really thought—and maybe it was naïve, maybe it was foolish—but he really thought that this year was _their year_.

But they couldn't do it.

They came this far and they couldn't win the Cup. He’s failed his fans, he’s failed his team, he’s failed his family. He’s failed himself. And if he gets out of the shower he’ll have to truly admit that there’s nothing else he can do. He’ll have to get dressed, meet up with his parents, call his agent, book his tickets home, and for what? So he can spend another summer training for a championship that might never come?

He hears someone call, “Sid? You in here?” He didn’t think anyone was still around besides the equipment staff, but the voice sounds distinctly like Geno.

“Sorry, G, I’ll be out soon,” he yells back, his voice hoarse from crying. Fuck, that’s embarrassing.

_It’s just the frustration,_ he reasons, because sometimes the signals get crossed and he ends up in tears. Normally he has a better grip on it, can swallow it down and use it to turn the tables on a situation, no matter what the nicknames from Philadelphia say.

He just thought he was alone, thought he’d be able to let it out a little bit.

Geno finds him a minute later in the stall farthest from the door, but stands stock-still as they stare at each other. Okay, well. Sid can do this. He can be the supportive captain that Geno probably needs him to be right now. Geno had a fantastic year and was a shining beacon of hockey glory in every place that Sid left dark. He should know he was the reason they made it to the finals at all.

He opens his mouth to let it spill out: the sloppy, heartfelt praise he’s had tumbling around in his head since the first time Geno stepped onto Pittsburgh ice. But Geno is wrapping him up in a hug, his eyes full of empathy following Sid’s all the way down into the embrace, and uh—wow—they’re both completely naked.

Geno is warm and too-thin, the post-season having taken so much from him, and he’s wet now under the shower spray with Sid. Sid can actually feel some of Geno’s bones through his skin—the ladder of his ribs and the sharp wings of his shoulder blades. They feel almost fragile. When Sid hugs back, he makes sure it’s gentle, and he can feel Geno sigh damp and broken against the side of his head.

It’s only another moment or two before Geno is reaching down. He palms Sid’s dick, but Sid is soft. Sid doesn’t even think he _could_ get it up right now, doesn’t know if he wants to, doesn’t think he deserves it. It still feels nice to be touched, feels good to be close to Geno.

Geno trails his fingers over Sid’s stomach and keeps his other arm around Sid’s shoulders, keeps their cheeks pressed together even if it means Sid has to stretch up on his toes and Geno has to bend down. Sid shivers even though the water is still warm, listening to Geno murmuring against his ear in slow, syrupy Russian. The words are lost on Sid but he hears the sentiments just fine. He responds without thinking, a keening noise in the back of his throat as his dick surprisingly begins to stiffen. Geno says something encouraging back, and then wraps his hand around Sid’s cock again, the barest pressure.

Sid’s eyes are still blurry and unfocused with tears when he reaches for Geno.

It takes a while for Sid, but somehow Geno is a greedy thing even in the wake of their heartbreaking loss. He only needs a few pulls to overwhelm him.

Geno has long-since come down from the shudders of his own orgasm when he coaxes it out of Sid like it’s as inevitable as the rain in spring. When Sid comes, it’s a relief—a release. The shower washes all the evidence down the drain. Sid watches the splatters slide away until he doesn’t feel stretched to transparency anymore.

“Sorry,” Geno finally says against Sid’s head, “I’m sorry.”

At first Sid thinks Geno means the sudden handjob, but his stomach sinks as the full weight of their cup loss returns to him. He swallows, tears springing back into his eyes. “No, don’t be sorry.”

“Sorry, Sid,” Geno says again, and now Sid is pretty sure that Geno is crying, too, “try hard and we still lose.”

“Hey,” Sid pulls back a little so they have to look at each other. He holds Geno’s face between his palms. Geno’s lips are chapped, his nose red, the edges of his eyes pink. He looks fucking awful and Sid is totally helpless to it.

Geno sniffles a bit, his gaze sliding away to the corner of the shower stall. Sid watched as he sniffs again and swallows, clenching his jaw and shaking with the force of trying to keep it together.

Sid thinks of all the times he didn’t quite make the cut. He thinks of all the times he failed and no one was around to hold him through it. He thinks about what he wanted to hear when he felt like all the stupid effort he put in just wasn’t _enough._  “You were amazing, Geno,” he says, shoving as much conviction into it as he can. “I’m so proud of you.”

As Geno blinks, a few fat tears drip from his eyes, and then he’s ducking his head again to press his body to Sid’s. This time, Sid hugs him like he’ll never let go. He uses all the energy he has left to make sure Geno feels like he’s cared for.

There are more things that Geno says, blubbering as he is through a wave of overwhelming emotion. Sid can’t understand him, but still tries to listen. He should probably say more, too—that he believes in Geno, that he’ll miss him over the break, that they’ll be even better next season—but for once it’s easier to touch than to speak. He can’t haul Geno any closer without the risk of overbalancing and collapsing into a slippery pile of limbs, but he tries.

“Promise,” he hears Geno say, isolated from any context in a sea of babbling Russian.

“I do,” Sid says, because anything Geno wants, anything at all, he’ll do it. “I will.”

* * *

 Being back in Cole Harbour this year is its own kind of hell.

Everywhere Sid goes, people give him gooey, pitying sympathy, which is almost worse than the hatred he was expecting. His mom and dad capture him in a sandwich embrace when he lugs all his equipment into the house. His old friends tell him he’ll have better luck next year, their voices distorted through the phone when he tries to put together an early-Saturday pickup game. The fucking butcher at the market and the attendant at the Shell station give him their condolences, too.

It’s a long time before he believes their consoling words are genuine, that their hopes for his next season will come true. He spends a lot of his mornings going for runs out by the water with the brim of his hat pulled low—dodging fishermen coming in with their catches—but he can only avoid the public for so long.

“So we do more strength training, more endurance,” Andy says when they meet up to discuss Sid’s summer training. Sid has no idea how he’s going to be fully back in shape in time for training camp. He feels almost limp with exhaustion and he doesn’t feel like eating anymore. “I’ve been thinking about some new stuff that should help with that. You could try it out.”

Andy is pretty firm about keeping him off the ice until at least mid-July, though.

“Can’t I at least have _some_ time?” Sid asks, poking at his salad.

“Tell you what,” says Andy, “I’ll give you an hour every other day if you can get your weight back up before Canada Day.”

Sid chews and swallows a big clump of spinach and emulates a smile. “Yeah, no problem.”

It’s a big problem.

He’s chugging protein shakes until he doesn’t like the flavor anymore. He eats more simple carbs than he can stand. He gets a near constant supply of fresh fish from the market. It all tastes the same in his mouth and from day to day he’s either staying stable or dropping weight. Andy cuts down his workout.

Finally, he breaks down and makes himself two boxes of Kraft Dinner.  He puts the pasta mass of fake cheese with breadcrumbs and diced tomatoes in a big bowl meant for baking, sits himself down on the couch in basketball shorts and a shirt that’s become baggy on him, and watches tape from the season.

He starts with the easy stuff—what he’s already seen while he was out nursing his ankle. He eats with his left hand and takes notes with his right, jotting down anything he thinks could be improved upon.

Then, after the hour-plus it takes to watch one game, he gets up, does some of the lighter stretches he knows, and washes his bowl in the sink. He goes for a run in the evening and watches another game before bed. The next day he repeats the process, only this time with a loaded tuna sandwich and a buster bar he grabbed from DQ post-run. By the time Mario calls to ask when he’s thinking of flying back into Pittsburgh, Sid’s starting in on watching the beginning of the playoffs.

“This is pretty impressive, Kid,” Andy tells him as he thumbs through the notebooks. Sid still isn’t at the weight he’s supposed to be, so his ice time is confined to hard, short bursts intended to keep his skating skills at peak. He’s still forced to practice his stick-handling in the parking lot of the rink. It just means he’s had a _lot_ of time for reviewing tape.

“I want to be better this season. If I know what I did wrong, I can fix it,” Sid says.

Andy gets this pinched look on his face that Sid has seen from just about every person he’s ever known for longer than a few weeks. He’s seen Andy himself make the expression more than a few times. It’s condescending and Sid’s never liked it. “You know,” Andy says, “there’s more to life than—”

“Off the ice too,” Sid interrupts, not wanting to hear the end of that sentence because fuck if he hasn’t heard it before. “I want to be a better person.”

It’s true in that he knows he needs to be a better captain for his team. He still feels woefully inexperienced when it comes to meeting the needs of a group of professional hockey players. And there’s maybe some _other stuff_ he wants to get better at that he’d absolutely never describe to Andy.

“Maybe find a hobby or something this year,” Andy says, handing back the notebooks.

Sid scoffs. “Yeah, right. What kind of hobby would I even have time for?”

“Beats me,” Andy says, “Take up knitting.”

* * *

 When training camp is done for the summer, and the team has a handful of days off before the preseason games begin, Mario and Nathalie host a barbecue and invite everyone on the team. It has the potential to become a raucous party, like any gathering of hockey players does, and Sid is running around the house trying to help out wherever he can. People can manage their own drinks, but there’s still plenty to do.

Mario runs out of burgers fairly quickly and Sid drives to the store to buy more. The first watermelon gets gobbled up by the children, and Sid cuts up the second one only to discover that he needs to wash the bowl because—unbelievably—someone had dumped a beer in it. Then, there’s the fact that a bunch of people want to play games on the lawn but didn’t think to bring their own equipment and Sid scrambles to find enough stuff in Mario’s shed. They run out of propane for the grill, there’s a shortage of plastic forks, someone’s kid skins a knee, and on, and on.

By the time the sun is about to set, Sid is feeling squirrelly and scampers up to his room. There, where the noise of the party is at least somewhat muffled, he can breathe easier. He just needs five minutes. Ten, tops.

“Sid?” Geno asks from his doorway, and Sid turns, caught, unable to slap any semblance of a happy host expression back onto his face.

“Hey,” Sid’s voice comes out falsely chipper, even if he can’t pull the corners of his mouth up into a smile, “You get lost on the way to the bathroom?”

Geno shakes his head. “I’m look for you. Too much party?”

It’s not the party, per se. Sid feels better than he did over the summer, but the cloud of self doubt still lingers. “Just needed a moment to myself, I guess.”

“Big parties, lots of people, feels lonely sometimes,” Geno says, and steps into the room, closing the door behind him. “Better to be with someone.”

He keeps coming forward, so Sid backs up, and backs up, until the back of his knees bump the edge of the bed. Then, there’s nowhere else for him to go, and Geno’s right up in his space.

“I guess so,” Sid agrees, and Geno has been close enough to kiss him before, but after so many misses, he knows better than to expect it now. Geno’s face is so close that Sid can feel the afternoon sun’s heat bouncing between their reddened cheeks.  It would almost make sense to let their lips meet, but then Geno gently bumps their foreheads together.

“Have secret, Sid,” Geno says, and he smells like fruit and beer.

“Yeah?” Sid is afraid to move his mouth too much or speak too loud.

“People think I’m not so smart, bad at talk, but truth is I’m _best_ person to bring to party. Never feel lonely with me.”

Sid can’t quite laugh, but he sits down on the bed and feels his breath stumble out of him. Geno follows him down, straddling his long legs over Sid’s thighs.

Even if Sid thought a lot about hockey over the summer, he thought just as much about Geno. Sometimes those things overlapped, and sometimes it was just Sid and his right hand and all the creativity he could muster. He’s been hesitant to think of what they’ve been doing as sex but it’s happened too many times to really be as casual as what he used to do in Juniors.

If he’s being honest with himself, he knows he doesn’t want the same things he did back when they first started.

The kissing thing, he doesn’t—he _can’t_ want. He tries not to think about it at all. Any time he does, the breath goes right out of him and he feels paranoid, like everyone around him can tell he’s been thinking about the dewy inside of Geno’s lips and what they would taste like. He banishes those ideas as soon as they arise.

_Other stuff_ , though.

Other stuff occupies his mind.  Like, would Geno like it if Sid slid his fingers inside of Geno’s ass, the way Sid does in the shower sometimes? Would Geno squeeze around him like a vice grip, or would he go soft and pliant?

Sid thinks a little nervously about sucking Geno’s dick—just a bit. He’s always so sloppy-wet, and would probably taste salty and bitter all over. Would he let Sid try?

Geno is a little above average in girth and Sid is sure he’d probably choke the first go-around, but would Geno enjoy that? Would he try to fuck into Sid’s mouth anyways? Because Sid thinks _he_ would like that.

And there are probably things Sid hasn’t thought of. He was too nervous all summer long to find ideas on the internet, too reluctant to type anything like ‘gay porn’ into his search bar because that would mean—

He doesn’t want to even contemplate _fucking_. He just—he loves the sounds Geno makes before he comes and he wants to draw them out louder, make them more frequent, any way he can. There’s a selfish part of him that even wants to make Geno beg for it.

Geno braces his hand against Sid’s shoulder for balance while he fishes his own dick from his pants. Sid does the same, although unzipping his jeans with a tall lap full of Russian proves to be something of a task.

But Geno is gripping him in that tight, not-quite-burning way of his, and Sid is both settled and aroused. He works Sid over, pausing to lick his palm every few strokes, and Sid has trouble keeping up.

He watches Geno. Geno gazes back at him. Sid twists his fingers on the upstroke the way he knows Geno likes, and Geno groans in a way Sid has never heard him groan before.

It’s loud. It’s shaky.  It’s truthful.

It’s all it takes for Sid to come—too fast—Geno following right after.

They lose their balance and Sid falls backwards onto the bed. Geno goes right with him and ends up sprawled, panting. His lips are too close to Sid’s. He’s so near. _God_.

Sid has to turn his head before he does something really stupid.

Geno’s thighs flex and he levies himself up off the bed, swaggering to the ensuite with more confidence than is strictly necessary, considering that every time they do this, Sid already feels like he’s fucking _died_.

The faucet runs and Sid tries to collect himself. He didn’t get any come on his clothes this time—which is nothing short of a miracle. Downstairs, the party is still going.  

Sid couldn’t have been up here for long, yet the sun’s dip to the horizon is dyeing his room orange and pink. He could probably hide up here for long enough that people start heading home to put kids to bed, but that’s not what a captain would do. A good captain would suck it up and take the recycling bag around for empty cans. He tucks himself away and zips back up, wipes his hand on the top of his sheets.

Geno comes out of the bathroom looking radiantly smug.

“Told you,” he says to Sid, offering him a hand up, “I’m best for party.” His smile is the stuff of Sid’s dreams—the ones where they prove every reporter and rival wrong, and win, win, win.

_Kiss me_ , Sid thinks before he can shove the bubbling in his chest deep down. “Come help me find the ice cream before it’s all gone,” he says instead.

* * *

 Sid feels fucking great, because tonight has been the night of phone numbers.

Somehow, between Tanger and Jordy, they found a bar in Pittsburgh where no one really knows who Sid is. He’s talking to girls and, for once, it’s _working_. The smiles they favor him with are flirtatious as they sweep their long hair over their shoulders. Two of them write their numbers on a napkin and another is bold enough to slide Sid's phone from his jeans and enter her information right into his contacts list.

There’s even a tall, dark-haired business man who Sid ends up having a conversation with. He has perfect teeth and mismatched eyes and discreetly kisses his card before slipping it into Sid’s back pocket. Nobody sees it happen except for Geno, so it’s fine, though Genoe does kind of glower at Sid across the bar.

Well, it’s not like Sid is going to _do_ anything about the guy’s number. He isn’t necessarily going to call any of the girls, either. It's just nice to be wanted in a way that isn’t tied to his job.

“You fucker,” Max shakes his head as Sid returns to the pool tables their group has commandeered. “I’ve seen you strike out a _thousand_ times.”

“It hasn’t been a thousand, come on,” Sid rolls his eyes.

“It’s his huge ass,” Flower says, and clinks his beer bottle against Tanger’s, who snickers. “Gotten so big no one can ignore it.”

“Whatever,” Sid grumbles. It’s technically not true anymore, but he’s not about to announce that his jeans are actually sitting a little looser in the seat this year.

The drinks keep coming, and Sid feels more relaxed than he has in a while. He’s not huge on alcohol, but he likes the way it makes him kind of floaty and kind of wild.  And, since they don’t have practice until the afternoon tomorrow, he doesn’t mind imbibing anything and everything the guys set in front of him. Sure, he’s maybe laughing too loud at Army’s bad jokes, but he feels a little effervescent, so it’s fine.

After a while, he stops venturing out to meet new people and just stays by the pool tables. He’s been to pee at least five times since they arrived and he’s kind of hungry.

Otherwise, he’s good. He’s so good.

“Time go home,” Geno says after a while, when Sid is leaning on Flower’s shoulder and giggling about something Jordy said.

“Already?” Sid asks, and takes a peek at his watch. Oh, damn, after midnight already. Yeah, probably for the best to mosey onward.

They take a car service back to Sewickley and Sid swears he can see the starlight in Geno’s eyes. He almost says as much except then Rihanna comes on the radio and Sid has to ask the driver to turn it up.

“Gonch and family asleep. Okay I stay on couch with you?” Geno asks him, and Sid’s smile feels like it splits his face. He hasn’t had a sleepover since he was a little kid.

“Yeah, no problem,” he says, and reaches over to adjust Geno’s collar where it’s flipped up on one side.

Sid helps Geno sneak into the Lemieux house so that they don’t wake anyone up.  Once they’re inside, Geno makes Sid drink a bottle of Gatorade. It’s only the red kind left, which Sid complains about internally. Geno has his own bottle of syrupy-awfulness, and they split a Tupperware of cold spaghetti leftovers by the light of the open fridge.

Sid thinks about the guy from the bar.  If Sid hadn’t made his excuses, would he have pressed Sid into a dark booth and kissed him? The thought makes him shiver and blush. Maybe the man would’ve sucked a spot on Sid’s neck, left a mark behind that he’d have to make an excuse for tomorrow in the locker room, to say nothing of the inevitable chirping from his teammates.

“Sure is okay?” Geno whispers, and Sid nods, thinking first of the pilfered snack.

“Oh,” he says, suddenly realizing what Geno meant, “To stay here? Yeah. You can just leave early.”

They go upstairs, and Sid skips over the one step that creaks, while Geno puts his weight right in the center of it. Sid pauses to listen to the house, but thankfully no one seems disturbed by the noise. They keep going up to Sid’s room, and once the door is closed and he flicks the light on, he sighs a bit in relief.

No one is the wiser of his guest.

Sid putters around, taking one of the pillows from his bed to set on the couch, changing into comfier clothes, and then brushing his teeth in the bathroom. Geno, meanwhile, shucks off his distressed jeans and paces in his boxers. He’s agitated, and Sid doesn’t really get why. Sid himself feels a little wired, but it’s nothing he won’t shed as soon as he crawls into bed. He’ll probably be out like a light.

“Sorry, I don’t have an extra toothbrush for you,” Sid says to Geno quietly when he enters the bathroom.

And then suddenly Geno is up in his space, pressing Sid against the wall where the plush bath towel keeps the rack from digging into his spine. He cups Sid’s face, slides his fingers into Sid’s hair, and Sid can’t help but lean into it even though his breath is stuck in his throat.

Then, Geno’s palms down Sid’s chest in broad strokes, Sid rolling his body up to meet him until finally his hands land on Sid’s hips. He pushes a thigh between Sid’s legs, and with his grip on Sid, guides him into a slow grind.

Sid lets out a choked noise and then remembers that the bathroom tile echoes. Though he’ll just have to keep quiet, because he sure isn’t moving. He’s so hard already and the friction of them thrusting against each other is so good.

_Christ_ , Sid still has toothpaste in the corners of his mouth.

“ _Sid_ ,” Geno whispers, eyes hooded and lips parted.

“Yes,” Sid replies, because he’ll let Geno do whatever he wants.

Geno tugs the waistband of Sid’s pajama pants, and Sid is so ready for Geno’s dry hand because he wants to _feel_ it tomorrow. Fuck it if he gets chafed. Only then, when Sid’s pants are half off, Geno is sliding down his body and taking the friction with him, which doesn’t matter because _oh—_ Geno is on his knees.

Sid goes abruptly lightheaded, blood rushing downward, because Geno’s face has never been anywhere in the vicinity of Sid’s dick before.  He couldn’t _possibly_ —but then he is. Geno swipes his tongue against the head of Sid’s cock, and Sid twitches so hard that his cock brushes across Geno’s cheek.

“Fuck,” Sid curses, and then starts to apologize, but Geno’s next move is confident, his grip sure as he holds Sid’s dick in place and takes it into his mouth.

It’s only a bit, but Sid feels like he’s being swallowed whole. He nearly shouts at the shocking sensation of wet heat. He has to clamp his hand over his mouth to keep from yelling the whole house awake. Geno’s mouth is slick, his lower lip plush where the crown of Sid’s dick rests against it, and all Sid can think is _GenoGenoGenoGenofuckyes_.

Geno goes a little deeper, lets Sid fill his mouth and then pulls off. Sid is fucking melting with every slippery pass of Geno’s tongue. It’s not creative. It’s not the greatest technique and the edge of Geno’s teeth keeps getting in the way.

It’s the best blowjob Sid has ever received.

He’s about to come, feels it building too fast, so he blurts, “Geno, I’m— _uh_.”

Then Geno pulls off.  Sid nearly smacks his fist into the wall in frustration, but luckily his hand hits the towel behind him instead.

Geno wipes the shine from his chin and frees his own erection as he stands. And then, _holy hell_ , he wraps his and Sid’s cocks together in his hand. With the spit and how wet Geno always is, they slide together too easily. Sid lets himself thrust into Geno’s grip. He’s used to the scratchy burn of Geno’s handjobs, but this is. This is just heaven.

With his free hand, Geno strokes the sensitive spot on Sid’s side where he’s usually ticklish, rubs the vee of Sid’s hips, palms Sid’s pecs through his shirt. And Sid tries to hold on, he really does, but then Geno’s lips come to rest next to the corner of his mouth and Sid comes like a blinding firework, knees turning weak. He clings to Geno, clutching Geno’s shoulders, and clenches his jaw so he doesn’t scream.

As Sid comes down from his orgasm, Geno is muttering in Russian again, but Sid knows the swear words pretty well. Sid watches as Geno strips his own cock, a faster pace than Sid would take with him.

“Yeah,” Sid says, his voice wispy in the quiet of the house. “Come on, Geno.”

Geno’s head falls to Sid’s shoulder, and he sucks right through the cotton fabric of his t-shirt to Sid’s skin beneath as he comes. Geno makes a strangled noise that Sid feels more than hears, still sparking through his own afterglow. Then, Geno lifts the bottom of Sid’s shirt, smearing their combined come onto Sid’s stomach as they both watch. He rubs it into Sid’s hips, his belly, his sides until it’s all spread.

Sid should probably think it’s disgusting, but he doesn’t, and the thought makes him chuckle.

It’s only the beginning of November and they’ve done this nine times already this Fall, but it’s never been like this. Sid’s never had _anything_ like this before.

He reaches up to feel the wet patch on his shirt and hopes maybe Geno will have left a bruise there. He shouldn’t want the hassle, but he feels kind of claimed by it, loves the idea. Geno rinses his hands in the sink and then runs a damp hand through his hair, catching Sid’s attention in the mirror.

Sid thinks he’s a little drunk, but he was wrong about earlier, when he thought he saw starlight in Geno’s gaze. The stars are in Sid’s own eyes, and Geno’s smoldering dark heat is a black hole that Sid is happily careening towards. He’d do it all again, if given the chance, and maybe in a different life he could’ve told Geno everything he’s feeling by this point.

He’s not going to start now, though.

“Time for bed,” Sid decides, and pushes Geno out of the bathroom and towards the couch.

He’s turning out the light and slipping beneath his sheets when he has a sudden realization.

“Oh shit,” Sid says, maybe a little loud.

“What?” Geno grouses from the couch. Sid would’ve let him up into the bed, and he’s kind of regretful for it, but—

“I’m not supposed to have girls up here.”

There’s a long silence, long enough that Sid thinks Geno might have just gone to sleep. But then he hears Geno sigh, put-upon. “Sleep, Sid,” Geno says. And Sid does. He sleeps better than he has in months.


	4. a first time for everything

The Stanley _Fucking_ Cup. It’s Game 7 in Detroit at the Joe and _it’s the Cup_.

Sid hasn’t ever had so much champagne in his life; bottle after bottle of Moet and Bud, almost half of it drunk from the shining silver trophy itself. His head and his heart are bubbling over. He wants to sing, shout, scream—the whole ordeal. And he’s just so proud of everything they’ve done as a team. He can still barely believe it.

Reporters swarm him with hundreds of the same rephrased question: "How does it feel?"

Sid tells each of them the same rephrased answer, although the truth of it is no less poignant: "It's incredible."

When he lifts the Cup, high above his head, whooping as his teammates yell back at him, he doesn't know why everyone says that it's lighter than air. It weighs a ton. All the sacrifices players have made and the broken hearts and the futures lost and won—that's what the Cup weighs. The Stanley Cup is a challenge to hold up, not because of the thirty four pounds, but because of what it means to everyone who has walked this path before him and everyone who will come after.

His heart, on the other hand, has floated right up to the moon.

The team migrates slowly from the ice, to the locker rooms, to the party at the hotel, and then finally onto their charter plane back to Pittsburgh. Some guys pass out in exhaustion, sprawling ungainly over as many seats as possible for a quick 45-minute nap.  Others flit from teammate to teammate, getting sloppy and emotional now that the cameras are turned off for a bit, rubbing their tear-and-beer-soaked playoff beards onto each other in adoration. Sid can’t help but hover next to the Cup for the duration, unable to let it out of his sight.

It’s the symbol of all he’s ever wanted, and now he has it. He supposes that the other guys are welcome to have their day with it—or more, because they deserve it and he’s so, so proud of them—but he’s never giving it back. The NHL will have to get a new prize because Stanley is _his_.

“You’re so drunk,” Flower says affectionately, and ruffs up Sid’s hair. Sid lets him do it. It feels nice.

“You’re drunk too,” Sid replies, his face stretched into a grin a mile wide. He’d tipped the fizzing contents of the Cup to Flower’s mouth in the locker room and had seen Flower hoarding his own bottle all night long.

Flower tilts his head. “Yes. But it looks better on me. You’re fucking—silly.” Sid supposes he’s right, but it doesn’t matter much how he looks. He feels safe with the guys and entitled to a little tomfoolery. There’s been some wild horror stories about post-finals celebrations, and they’ve not even scratched the surface yet.

The _Cup!_

Sid can’t wait to launch it into Mario’s pool.

Flower giggles at him, so he must be babbling. Sid reaches out to stroke the silvery rim of the Cup again, which is a little bit tacky from all the liquor they’ve poured into it. “I hope you get your dick sucked tonight,” Flower tells him, and Sid feels too glowing to be abashed.

“You too,” he beams. “That _save_ —”

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” Flower winks, “I got it covered. Just make sure you don’t pass up any offers. Celebrate! You could probably stand to loosen up a little, eh?” He elbows Sid and Sid just smiles and tugs the Cup closer.

* * *

 When they get back to Pittsburgh, the trainers make Sid see a doctor as soon as he’s slept and sobered up a little. His knee is mostly fine.

He didn’t tear anything, thankfully, but they put him in a flexible brace just to be safe. The doctor sends him out the door with nothing more than instructions to call if he feels any sharp pain or numbness. He’ll have to go for another checkup before the parade, but he’s lucky he can spend the summer without having to do surgery and rehab.

His mom gives him a ride to the party because he’s not supposed to bend his knee more than he has to.   He’s also sure that it’s not especially likely he’d pass a sobriety test yet.

“Mom,” he says, as she pulls as close to the front door as she can get with all the flashy cars lining the driveway, “Thank you.”

She puts the car in park. “Oh, no problem, sweetie. Have fun, and we’ll see you tomorrow.”

“No,” he says, “I mean. Thanks for getting me here, to the Cup. Without you and Dad, I’d never have gotten this far. I wouldn’t have gotten _anywhere_. I don’t know how I’ll ever make it up to you.”

His mom gives him a soft look, and it’s one Sid associates with being home, being cherished. “You don’t have to make it up to us. We did it because we love you and it made you happy. Even when it was tough, when it was _awful_ ,” her voice shakes, and none of them like to talk about those years, “you still loved playing, so we made it work.”

Sid doesn’t know how to respond to that, so he just says, “Thank you. I love you, too.”

He manages not to break out in tears, but his mom makes a sappy noise as he hugs her over the gear shift of her rental car and he figures some waterworks are inevitable. Then she leaves him with a wave and a promise to pass the message on to his father, and tidily reverses out onto the street.

And then Sid goes to fucking party.

The celebration at Mario’s is crazier than he expected, though he supposes that he shouldn’t be surprised.

Anyone and everyone is here. He gets greeted by front office staff and trainers, and jostled by every teammate he passes. The Cup is at the front and center of it all, standing in a place of honor on its own table in the backyard and surrounded by crumpled beer cans.

That is, until Sid grabs the Cup and throws it into the water to the cheers of all in attendance.

There are heaps of food and booze, music and laughter. The spare fridge is being emptied, the wine cellar sucked dry, the pool is full of people and slopping over into the yard, and Sid walks in on a lot that he’ll never unsee.

By nightfall, he’s happened upon enough of his teammates in various half-naked contortions and in so many combinations that Sid’s dick is half-hard in his shorts and won’t go down. The lights are dimmed and most people who aren’t players or their wives have gone home, so he doesn’t need to worry about exposing himself to the entire Pens organization, but he’s gotta get off. Soon.

“ _Yes, fuck yes!_ ” Geno yells in Sid’s ear when they run into each other inside the house. He grabs Sid’s shoulders and shakes him. Geno is flushed and his eyes are glimmering, but the skin on his face is as smooth as the first day of camp. Sid hasn’t shaved yet, but he’s grateful he could grow something almost-decent this year.

Sid grabs Geno by his sides.  He’s as thin as he was last playoffs, but this time it’s not quite so heartbreaking. At some point during the night, Geno lost his shirt. It’s probably at the bottom of the pool, because he smells like chlorine and his hair is curling messy and damp on his forehead. “We did it,” Sid agrees, smiling. He’s barely stopped smiling at all, and it’s been a full day since he first put his lips to Lord Stanley.

Geno just looks so good. Fuck.

Well, if everyone else is _busy_ , Sid might as well be too.

He snags Geno’s hand and tugs him upstairs.

It’s blessedly empty in his room, though the party throbs through the walls. Sid can’t stop trembling, and every impulse just tumbles out of him.

His lips find Geno’s jaw as he locks the door behind them, tasting liquor and sweat and the sticky texture of success. Geno groans Sid’s name and a jumble of sweet-sounding Russian. Sid jerks away, his stomach jumping, realizing what he’s done with his tongue still against the edge of skin and bone. But Geno seems to like it, so Sid moves more tentatively this time, not just a reaction to the moment. He kisses Geno’s neck, just under his ear.

Then Geno _moans_ , loud and reckless.

“Fuck, G,” Sid says, and he’ll shelve that reaction for later when it’s just him and his hands. For now, he hooks his fingers into the belt loops of Geno’s jeans and reels him in, hips first. The bulge of Geno’s dick grinds deliciously against his own, all muted pressure and not nearly enough to satisfy.

Sid would love to get his mouth on it.  He’s glanced at the thickness of it enough times, held it in his hand.  He’s pretty sure he wants to feel it sliding on his tongue.

There’s been nothing but handjobs for months.  All through the playoffs, Sid kept his distance, not wanting to mess around with his carefully-constructed routine. But he’s got victory in his veins now, and he’s aflame with want. He wants to hear the way Geno’s voice will shake and shatter when he’s got his cock somewhere hot and wet and tight.

“Wait long time,” Geno murmurs.

“Well, then stop waiting,” Sid replies.

Sid maneuvers Geno against the door so he has some leverage, can circle his hips between rubbing against Geno’s thigh and dick, and tugs their hips together as hard as he can without ripping fabric.

For his part, Geno can’t keep his hands still—can’t seem to make up his mind about where to touch. He fists them in the back of Sid’s shirt, and then slides them down to cup Sid’s ass and tug his thighs closer. He strokes up Sid’s arms, sliding one hand into his hair and the other over his shoulder. Then, it’s both hands on the small of Sid’s back, helping to guide his thrusts faster.

Sid mutters, a little disbelievingly, “fuck _me_ ,” and then Geno is pushing him back, back until he hits the bed.  He drops down, looking up to see Geno towering over him.  For an exhilarating moment, he thinks he’ll get what he wants—Geno’s cock in his mouth.

But then Geno is lying on top of him, grinding his whole weight down onto Sid, the both of them on top of covers still left half-rumpled from Sid’s afternoon nap. Geno settles into the space between Sid’s legs, working his hips in a frustrating rhythm that’s just a stone's throw from perfection.

This isn’t really the best position for blowjobs, though, and Sid’s going to get his fucking way tonight.

He lets Geno grind against him for a while, and then—when he thinks Geno is sufficiently distracted—braces against the bed and uses his legs, hooked around Geno’s hips, to flip them.

Sid sprawls ungainly over Geno, which gives Geno the opportunity to get the upper-hand again,  Sid still scrambling to get to his knees.

“Uh,” Sid half says, half groans when he’s trapped underneath Geno’s weight again, “Geno.”

“Let me,” Geno says, and Sid has no intention of just _letting him_.

It’s echoing in his mind, a clear repeated confession: _I want to suck you_. Yet he doesn’t say it. He can’t. So instead, he grips Geno’s arms and shoves.

Geno topples to the side, and Sid crawls over him. He feels powerful with Geno under him, both of them flushed with the afterglow of success, but the way Geno looks at Sid with such heat gives Sid confidence.

He swallows his doubt. Geno can always tell him no, after all. It’ll only be awkward for as long as he lets it be.

“I want—”

“I know what you want,” Geno interrupts.

“You do?” Sid asks. God, he hadn’t meant to be so _obvious_.

Geno nods. He slides his hands over Sid’s ass with intent. Sid sucks in a gasp of air. Geno squeezes just right, and Sid is startled into a moan.

This time, Geno flips him onto his stomach, blanketing his long body over Sid’s, and breathing hotly against his neck. Sid is burning up. He can feel Geno’s cock against his ass where he bears down in heavy thrusts. Geno skims his hands along Sid’s arms so he can tangle their fingers together. His hands are huge, and Sid clenches in their grip when Geno sucks Sid’s earlobe between his lips.

Sid can feel his own pulse thrumming all over. He feels trapped, but in the best way, like Geno won’t let him go until they’ve both come. It makes his head spin.

Geno lets go of Sid’s hands eventually, so Sid clutches at the bedspread instead, trying to find an anchor. Then, Geno wedges a hand beneath him, unbuttons Sid’s shorts and slides the zipper down. At this point, if Geno wants to jerk him off and just hump against his ass forever, that’ll be just fine. Fantastic, even. Sid can’t think of a better way to die.

He mutters something encouraging—missing coherence by a mile.  But Geno tugs his shorts down, and Sid is left struggling between the opposing curves of his cock and ass until Geno’s weight shifts up and away. Sid feels the cool air of the room on his exposed skin as Geno slides his shorts down off his ankles, boxers and all. In the next moment Sid hears the faint tell-tale purr of Geno’s zipper being pulled down, too.

Oh, is he going to—?

They’ll need lube. And probably a condom. Sid knows there’s some in his bedside table, but he can’t move, can barely think.

Geno pushes his legs apart and Sid mindlessly obeys. Sid’s not ready; he couldn’t stop if he tried. He scoots up a little on the bed, and spreads his legs as wide as he can, heat flashing through him. Geno palms his cheeks apart. Sid whimpers.

They need _lube_.

Then, Sid feels something warm-slick-good on his hole. And fuck. Oh Christ. That’s Geno’s _tongue_.

Geno makes a considering noise and Sid just about pushes him away, but then Geno dives back in. The sensation lasts for longer this time, a back-and-forth stroke that makes Sid’s answering moan escalate into a shout.

It feels—he doesn’t know. Hot, dirty, kind of luxurious in a way. Sid is so sensitive there, more than he would have expected from the vague fumbling he's done to himself before. He wants it deeper, faster, but he finds that he likes the tease.

“ _Geno_ ,” Sid whines, and Geno hums in acknowledgement, which just adds another layer of decadent pleasure to Sid’s plate. Sid has to bury his face into the sheets because the noises that are coming out of his own mouth are entirely unbidden. Surely, he can’t let Geno hear all of them.

With every agonizing second that passes while Geno eats Sid out, the more adventurous Geno becomes, circling and laving and flickering his tongue. He’s dripping spit onto Sid’s balls, but it feels too good to mind. Every movement is sending Sid spiraling.

Geno’s trying out different patterns, and is that—the alphabet? He’s heard this trick before, passed around locker rooms, and he doesn’t want that—doesn’t want to be reduced to one-night-stand sex tips, as maddening as it feels. He just wants more.

He reaches back with one hand and shoves Geno’s face forward until all he can do is short, hard passes with his tongue and sucking kisses on Sid’s hole. Sid practically writhes, riding his ass against Geno’s mouth with what little leverage he still has.

It’s like he can feel it to his very core, like getting an itch scratched, but not quite. Geno sounds like he loves it and everything he does, every lick, every motion makes Sid sloppier and more tender, and Sid is shuddering apart.

Sid can’t hold on. He can’t wait. He tugs on Geno’s hair and gets his hand on his own dick and it’s one, two, three, four pulls before he’s coming. He nearly screams. He goes right out of his mind.

Geno eases Sid away from the wet spot that Sid has made, and lays next to him, stroking Sid’s side as Sid wheezes and tries to feel like something other than a puddle of popped champagne. Geno’s face is wet from the bridge of his nose to his chin, and Sid wants to kiss him so bad.

“Oh my god,” Sid says instead. “I can’t believe you did that. Wasn’t it, I don’t know, weird? Dirty?”

Geno shrugs, and oh right, they don’t talk about this.

“Gimme a second, I’ll—” And Sid can totally get up. He _will_. In just a bit. Fuck.

He still wants to blow Geno.

Sid figures out the best way to curl up to keep pressure off his knee, and ends up laying with most of his body on the bed, his bum leg outstretched and the other bent. He frees Geno’s cock from his pants and it looks so hard and flushed that it should be hurting. He looks up at Geno, but he’s flung one arm over his eyes, and Sid can’t read his expression.

So Sid just goes for it. He puts his mouth on the head of Geno’s cock and tries to be mindful of his teeth.

Above him, Geno sucks in an audible, hissing breath. Sid pulls off, worried he did something wrong, but then Geno’s hips pump up, questing, and oh, he likes it. _Awesome_.

In theory, Sid knows exactly what the fuck he’s doing. Spit and suction and movement, in pretty much any combination, should do the job. In practice, he’s not so smooth. He gets lost in the feel and taste, trying to figure out if he enjoys the forbidden sensation of a dick on his tongue or if it’s just _Geno_. When he stops for too long, Geno whines and smacks the bed with his free hand, twitches jolting his legs. Sid finds that it's hard to bob his head without skimming his teeth. He can’t fit enough in his mouth. He can’t even get Geno’s cock _near_ his throat and when he sucks it seems weak.

He resolves himself to practicing this on his own time with his fingers and whatever else he can get his hands on, and instead just suckles the head while he jacks the rest of Geno’s dick with his hands. It’s inelegant, but it does the trick, and soon Geno is groaning, “ _Sid, Sid, Sid,_ ” so Sid pulls his mouth off.

He’s just deciding he actually wants it across his lips when Geno comes in his hand. Some of it hits him under his chin. He wipes it off and onto the sheets. He’ll definitely have to do a load of laundry.

“Sid, so good,” Geno says, grabbing blindly until his hand rests on Sid’s shoulder, “best I’m ever have.” And Sid will take the compliment for now, but there’s no way he’s done trying to improve. There’s a lot of ground to cover.

The sounds of the party come floating through the room again, and Sid beams at Geno’s softening dick. It’s been a fantastic season.

"Yeah well, _you're_ the MVP," Sid reminds him.

* * *

 Geno texts him a lot over the summer, but as much as Sid’s gut swoops whenever he sees Geno’s name pop up on his phone, it’s mostly innocent stuff. His written English is still not great, so it’s things like _see cat she like me)))_ and _promise eat russian food c me soon best_.  

It’s when hockey rolls around again that the story changes.

He’s texting Sid to hang out nearly every day they have off, and then some. And while Sid usually has a meeting or interview or some other team business to attend to, he spends what little time he has left with Geno, trying not to think at all about what that means.  In any case, it’s rarely to chat over cheeseburgers.

He goes to dinner with Geno and they end up leaving before dessert so Sid can blow Geno in the back of Sid’s car—because Geno’s is too small and sporty for them to fit, though they've certainly tried. He invites Geno up to his room to play NHL on the Xbox, and an hour later he’s got his pants around his ankles and Geno’s tongue in his ass, praying nobody opens the door on them. They’ll be away on a roadie and sneaking up to the hotel room during team lunch so they can jack each other off while Sid tries to suck on Geno’s neck without leaving a mark.

Sid is well aware of exactly what Geno is really asking for when they arrange to meet up, but he’s so easy for it anyways. Every time, he tells himself that they’ll just talk hockey, talk strategy, talk about _the betterment of the team_. Inevitably, Geno gives Sid a look that says more than Sid can handle. So Sid will drag Geno in by the hips, afraid of what letting Geno look at him for too long will mean, and then they end up half undressed and sweating, cursing. Geno’s getting really fucking good at taking him apart.

It feels like it can go on forever. This thing he has with Geno—getting each other off in secret—it seems eternal. Not even the Winter Olympics can curdle their friendship. Not even an early playoff loss to Montreal can bring them down. Not even the danger of getting caught gives them pause. Sid plays his best year yet while Geno works up quite a reputation for clocking penalty minutes.

He knows he’s greedy for Geno’s time. He knows he’s desperate for Geno’s hands and his mouth, and still dreaming about all the things he won’t ask for. Sid is fucking insatiable, but Geno seems to have the competitive edge in neediness most days, always watching Sid in a way that makes him burn, even when they both should be focused on hockey.

He thinks it’ll last until the end of time, Geno and him, sneaking around to draw breathy gasps from each other and punctuating every goal with a private firework display.

It’s devastating to find out that he’s wrong.

 


	5. false summit

The first thing that happens is the Winter Classic.

And the second thing is Tampa Bay.

When Sid was little, his mom would get migraines. There were long stretches of time where she would draw the curtains and beg for quiet. Sid learned to make a full array of bachelor culinary specialties on those days with his dad's instruction, from Hamburger Helper to club sandwiches to grilled chicken and potatoes. He remembers sorting his hockey cards on the living room carpet, first alphabetically, and then by team, and then by year, and then finally by personal preference. He remembers listening to the ticking of the clock, the dripping kitchen tap, and the humming of the refrigerator, always an unusual sort of harmony. He remembers lying on the couch and trying to find shapes in the popcorn stucco of the ceiling.

Sid’s concussion is similar in a lot of ways.

He spends his time drifting, as if in a sensory deprivation chamber. He loses track of time and who he is. His thoughts are threadbare, transparent, temporary, and he can’t grasp them. He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t know if he sleeps.

Everything is headaches and nausea. Any glimmer of light is a railroad spike through his brain. Any time he stands his world pitches and twists violently. There’s a ringing in his ears that most of the time sounds like the horn blast at the end of a losing game. He sees a confusing jumble of blue, white, red and yellow, swirling under his eyelids. When he speaks, his tongue feels swollen. His mind is like a jigsaw, disassembled and scrambled overnight.

And then, one morning, he wakes up with a headache somewhere in the realm of normal. He gets up and eats chicken soup at the dining room table while Nathalie looks on in concern. He takes a shower. He calls his parents. He feels hope.

After that, the symptoms come and go.

He does what he can on his good days, puttering around the house with the simplest of chores and trying not to jostle his head. Sometimes, he feels like his brain is swaddled in thick cotton and other times it feels like it’s trying to expand past his skull. Once in a while, he can check the game stats in the Post Gazette without incurring concussed wrath.  

There are even some really great moments when he can peek out the window at the clinging Pittsburgh winter, just at dawn when the snow is sparkling shades of peach and lilac that reminds him of home. He learns to love listening to Mike Lange on the radio, lying in the dark on game nights, imagining the cut of his skate blades on a fresh sheet of ice and becoming more and more desperate to get out of bed for hockey.

Near the end of February, Sid is well enough to get out of the house for an hour or two at a time. He spends most of his outings at appointments, trying desperately to avoid the public. He isn’t allowed to drive yet and relies on rides and the generosity of others. Mario drives him to the rink one day, right before the start of a long road trip. It’s the first time he’s been allowed anywhere near the ice since early January.

Mario still has meetings for another hour and a half.  Sid is supposed to be resting in the main trainers’ room with the lights off, maybe getting in a quick nap before the drive home when the low sun will flicker through the trees and be all the more irritating. He can’t sleep though, and he quickly grows bored of counting tiles and visualizing the cool, calming metal of the Stanley Cup.

Sid knows he’ll get in trouble if he goes anywhere near the ice—although he thinks it wouldn’t hurt him to just sit on the benches for a while. Instead, he’ll just go hunting for a Gatorade. He knows that his appetite is weak, but he’ll hydrate because it’s good for his recovery.

Sid treads slowly—avoiding long looks into any fluorescent lights on the way—but treats himself to the long route to the cooler that houses all the team’s drink options. He hates the way his legs feel stiff and sore with disuse whenever he walks. Fatigue hangs about him like a smoggy plague. Every day he feels his fitness slipping away, but it's as if he’s trudging through mud every time he gets out of bed.

He goes for the lemon-lime Gatorade and stubbornly stands there taking small sips. He’s debating on whether he should shove some leftover post-game meal from last night into the microwave when Geno comes around the corner on crutches.

It was on a night when Sid was just starting to get used to the radio broadcasts that Geno wrecked his knee. Sid felt helpless, imagining the sickening tear of ligaments in vivid detail. And as much as Sid’s timeline for recovery is uncertain, and therefore unbearably frustrating, Geno will probably be out until fall. That may be worse to bear. There's nothing Geno can do from this point but surgery and physio. He can't help the team for the rest of the year.

Geno is maybe one of the few people who cares as much about hockey as Sid does, and Sid really cherishes that. Seeing Geno moping around the arena is encouraging, in a way.  Sid empathizes—he should also really be sleeping off the pain.

“Hey, Geno,” Sid says with a wince.

“Trainers say you nap. I’m not believe.” Geno’s face is drawn and grey. His hair is a disaster; his toque in his hand.

Sid shrugs. “You found me, I guess.”  He tries to smile, but can’t. They sure are a sorry pair.

“Can I talk to you?” Geno asks, and Sid gestures for him to go on, but the both of them just stand there in silence. Geno stares at the floor. Sid looks at Geno’s cowlick and yearns to smooth it down.

He should have made the effort and called Geno the night Geno got injured, or at least the morning after. Sid should have been there with empathy by the truckload. He should have been around to cradle Geno’s tender, wounded heart. What Sid did, instead, was turn off the radio and trace the stitching on his duvet cover until he was too tired to do anything but sleep.

“It’s, uh,” Geno finally says, and twists his lips, pensive, "maybe you sit down."

"No thanks," Sid says. He's a worried now, though. Is Geno's injury worse than they thought? Will he be out for longer or have to prematurely retire? Is something wrong with his parents? It is a visa issue? Does Russia want him back? Sid’s brain comes up with a thousand catastrophes in a matter of seconds.

Geno says, “I don’t think we should do this.”

Sid freezes.  

The whole damn universe pauses.

“Do what? What _this?_ ” He asks.

“ _This,_ ” Geno repeats, jerking his head to reference something passing between them.

But. “There’s no _this._ ” Sid says. There _isn’t_. What they have, what they do, it’s all just for fun. Sid has a handful of expressions to describe what they are to each other. Friends with benefits. Fuck buddies. It doesn't mean anything. It can't.

“It’s not good,” Geno presses. “Can’t do. Have to be serious from now.”

“Okay but there’s not—“ Sid tries to swallow down the dryness, but his tongue sticks on the roof of his mouth. There’s an almighty pressure building between his eyes. “If you want to stop f—um, the—” He can’t say too much. Anyone could walk in on this conversation. The vague terms are maddening and Sid can barely concentrate on more than the fact that Geno had said _it’s not good_.

“Are you understand?” Geno asks, and when he finally meets Sid’s eyes, there’s nothing but a smooth, glassy pond of careful indifference there.

The lights are too bright. “ _No,_ ” Sid says.

“Sorry, Sid—“

“There’s nothing to be _sorry_ for. There isn’t anything to end.”

“Don’t be pretend—”

“I don’t know what you’re _talking about_.”

They stand there. Geno clenches his jaw. Sid tries to focus on the condensation collecting on the plastic of his Gatorade bottle, and not on the bruise-coloured auras creeping into the edges of his vision. His breath rattles in his head like a sandstorm on a tin roof. He prays no one is listening to the two of them. He prays no one ever has. He prays Geno is just confused and things will go back to the way they were: secrets and mutual enrapture.

It’s Geno who breaks the silence, like it always is. He speaks slowly, firmly, as if to a petulant child. His eyes are like flint. “Hockey is most important to me. More important than anything. I’m get it back and not let silly thing like you and me be distract. So I can’t do this.”

“And I’m telling you that there’s no _this_. God,” Sid says, giving up and pressing his palm to his forehead. It hurts to say it, even though he knows he _has_ to deny everything he’s feeling. His voice sounds wet in his ears. “I don’t know what you think is going on between us.” And Sid was stupid to have ever contemplated going on like this with Geno. The room spins. He’s panicking, his breath going short and shallow, but it’s the only way to keep his glass walls from shattering and spilling his softest parts onto the ugly laminate of the floor.

The pain in his head is suddenly sharp, insistent. “Whatever you think was happening—it was just some fun. That’s all. There isn't anything to stop.” He doesn't want it to end. He wants to curl back up in the trainers' room like none of this conversation happened.

“Sid,” Geno’s voice goes soft, suddenly, but it’s too late. Sid sees flashes of blue and white, red and yellow, grey and black, and then nothing.

Nothing at all.

* * *

 That’s the end of it; a small cataclysm in Sid's life that no one will ever know about. Geno gets his surgery. Sidney wades through the darkness.

* * *

 “Sid?”

There’s a light rap of knuckles against his door and then it’s opening. He has his curtains partly open today, and noise isn’t bothering him too much, but the nausea has reared its head again.  He’s stayed mostly reclined just in case he's one wrong move away from making a mess of the carpet. “You’ve got a guest,” Mario says, and there stands Geno behind him.

Well then, Sid doesn’t really have the option to say no. He's never really wanted to say no before, anyway.

Geno has a backpack slung over his shoulders and the crutches are gone, but his knee is held in a complex brace of metal and plastic. His pale skin is marred with a crimson scar.

“It’ll be good for you to have some company,” Mario says, and then leaves before any protest can be made, totally oblivious to the potential devastation he’s just wrought.

Geno hobbles over to Sid’s bed and sits. Sid watches him do it.

“About what I’m say few weeks ago—”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Sid interrupts, “ever. Thanks.”

“Okay,” Geno says. Whatever speech Geno had prepared hangs like a glaring billboard between them, but Sid doesn’t want to hear it. Sooner or later, he and Geno are going to be back on the same team, and Sid wants to get over it before that happens. Right now the place where he’s trying to heal—somewhere right in the middle of his chest—is bubbling like an untreated infection, burning hot and dark.

He’s been dwelling far too much on it when all he can do all day is think.

“Why are you here?” Sid finally asks. The last time Geno came over was on New Year’s morning, hungover and grinning like the world was all sunflowers and pecan pie.

Geno shrugs, not meeting Sid’s gaze, and swipes an imaginary crumb off the bedspread. “Can’t watch playoffs alone.”

“Well you can’t watch them here. I’m not allowed any screen time this week.” He was allotted ten minutes on Monday to check his email, but most people have started calling him by now. All that his inbox showed was junk and a few community newsletters.

“How you do, then?” Geno asks.

“Listen on the radio.” Like a grandpa, or a kid in the 50s, but Mike Lange’s depictions of the game were colourful and entertaining. It wasn’t necessarily the best choice for someone who was more of a visual learner, like Geno.

“So I listen with you.”

Sid tries not to grit his teeth. “It doesn’t start for two hours.”

“I wait. Is no problem.”

It was a problem for Sid. All it took was a minute of Geno’s presence to make him miss his privacy again, despite how much he had been craving companionship. “I can’t entertain you, or anything.”

Geno shifts the backpack he’s wearing. “Brought stuff for me.”

Sid gives in. He can’t turn Geno away this time, anyways, not when Mario had already invited him inside. “Fine. Close the curtains. I’ve had my limit of light for the day.”

“Sure,” Geno agrees, and does it, shrouding the bedroom from the early afternoon sun. Then he eases himself onto Sid’s couch and doesn’t say another word until game time.

Geno ends up coming over for the next two weeks after his morning PT, even when the Penguins have an off-day. He sits and reads by a low lamp, working slowly through  a dusty-looking tome. Mostly, Sid spends his time trying to ignore Geno in favor of sleep, but eventually his curiosity swells.

Geno is not known for indulging in literature. Then again, Sid realizes, he doesn’t know much about Geno that isn’t how he plays hockey, how he likes his sandwiches, and what he sounds like when he’s desperate to come.

The letters on the cover are embossed gold Cyrillic over false green leather.

“ _Anna Karenina_ ,” Geno says when Sid finally asks. He shows the pages to Sid as if he can make heads or tails of written Russian, let alone any kind of text lately.

Sid settles onto the other end of the couch, far away from Geno, and with his legs drawn up. He hasn’t made it out of sweatpants today and he’s feeling sluggish. “Do you like it?”

Geno hums. “Not really.”

“And yet you’re still reading it.”

At this, Geno blushes and looks sheepish. “Friend back home say I should read. She say it’s good Russian and very interesting. But it’s too many people in book for me to know what’s go on. It’s slow for me to read.”

The last fiction book Sid read was _Harry Potter_ with Taylor. He prefers history and biographies, although he has to admit: he’ll sooner spend his free time doing a million other things before he’ll settle down with a book. He’s surprised that he misses reading, though. He watches with some kind of voyeuristic fascination as Geno works through the book at a pace of about one page every three minutes or so, occasionally flipping back a few pages and making the same face he uses when he doesn’t quite understand a reporter’s line of questioning. Geno doesn’t track words with his finger like he’s seen some people do as a remnant from elementary school techniques, and he doesn’t mouth along to the story, or hold his head in his hands, or toy with the edges of the pages. Sid has never seen Geno this focused and still. He’s usually pacing his feet in his skates or bouncing his leg under the table at team dinner.

That’s when Sid realizes that the staring is probably pretty creepy.

He clears his throat and fiddles with the radio he placed on the coffee table. “Game’s gonna start soon.”

“Okay,” Geno says, and closes the book with a Giant Eagle receipt tucked between the pages.

The Penguins get bumped from the playoffs by Tampa in seven games, round one. Sid is upset that his concussion kept him from helping; from being there with the guys to suffer through the handshake line together. He makes the conscious effort to go in to the arena for locker cleanout, and assembles a short pep talk about hard work and team efforts and next-time-we’ll-get-it-for-sure, all of which feels hollow to him because he has no idea _when_ he’ll be back. He’s not nearly as confident as he was earlier in the year.

Still, the guys bump his shoulder gently and shake his hand when they leave, as if he’s the only one who needs comforting. Next season, he promises himself, he’ll be an even better captain. The guys will lean on him, and not the other way around.

He gives his usual plain, ordinary soundbites to a cluster of reporters and tries to believe the words himself.

The trainers want to get him on the ice before he leaves town for the summer. He barely breathes as he laces his skates which still fit like a dream. They don’t let him get the rest of his gear on, although there’s some debate as to whether he needs a helmet. In the end, they send him out with Mario instead. If he can make a lap of the rink, he’ll be allowed to skate at home as soon as he feels ready.

It doesn’t occur to him to stretch the truth the first time. Sid gets the ice under him, and the glide of it makes his head spin. Abruptly, he’s about to heave his breakfast of oatmeal and strawberries all over. He braces his hands on his knees. His legs must only stay steady through years of muscle memory, because he feels as if at any moment he’ll crumple or slip.

Eventually, he gets his bearings, though the nausea doesn’t leave him. He tries to skate a circle by the bench door, a little shuffle of skates, but he hits a mental wall that doesn’t feel nearly worth the effort to burst through. God damn it. _Fuck_.

“How is it?” Mario asks, coming through the gate as Sid tries to do something, anything, that resembles skating.

“I feel awful,” Sid blurts out as he manages a weak stop.

“Well, you don’t look it,” Mario says with a hopeful smile, just when Sid gets bowled by another wave of dizziness and clutches his knees again. “Uh, never mind. Should we go back?”

Sid doesn’t want to risk shaking his head. “I can still try,” he insists.

In the end, he can’t even make it a quarter of the way around. He vomits onto the goal crease and then Mario guides him back to the locker room with a hand on his elbow.

“There’s still time, eh?” Mario says as he bends to get Sid’s skates off while Sid presses a damp towel to his face, embarrassed and frustrated and desperately trying to save his tears for when he’s alone. “You'll have training camp and then the pre-season. Take it easy.”

“I’m just tired of lying down in the dark. I don’t want to be like this forever,” Sid says, hoping the towel hides the crack in his voice.

Mario pats his knee. “You won’t. You’ll come back soon.”

Objectively, Sid agrees with Mario, with the trainers, and with his doctors. Injury is temporary, especially at his age. He just wishes that he had a bit of goodness to cling to right now. Instead, he just feels lost, adrift with no compass.

Mario drives Sid back to the house to pack up his few belongings for the summer. Geno has left his copy of _Anna Karenina_ at the foot of Sid’s bed with a note in scratchy, painstaking English print: _text me in summer_.

It’s still raw.  It still stings. It shouldn’t, but Sid is scoured inside and out by the whole ordeal. He could barely look Geno in the eyes for two weeks of visits.

Sid has half a mind to lose Geno’s number.

* * *

 When he gets home, Sid finds a Mom and Pop grocery store in Halifax that is more than happy to quietly deliver groceries to his lake property without bothering him.  All he has to do is send over one of his signed sticks.

He hides indoors and develops a weird napping pattern to avoid the sun whenever it nears the horizon—a difficult task in the summer months when the sunset can stretch on for nearly an hour. Exercise is still mostly forbidden to him, but he does it anyway, designing a few sets himself to maximize his flexibility in the absence of Andy’s guidance.  He scans some articles on yoga, but ultimately decides that most of it sounds hokey. Still, he lets the slow-and-steady style inspire him.  

His appetite is back in full force, and he gets a book called _101 Maritime Dishes_ for his more adventurous days. He learns to make a lobster fettuccine that is more than a bit sinful, and a lobster cobb salad that is probably closer to something that might be allowed by his diet plan, which he’s been ignoring as much as the exercise ban.

Taylor comes over on a day when he feels practically healthy, and he grills swordfish for her on his back deck, serving it with a mango salsa. His parents visit on Sundays after Mass and he makes them salmon and quiche in his oven.

Sid buys a lot of audiobooks from iTunes. Some days, all he can do is lie in bed and listen to some gentle-voiced British man read to him about World War Two. He tries to listen to broadcasts of Blue Jays games, but it’s not the same as Penguins Radio. He can’t really get into weekend Canadian football either.

Geno does try to text him a few times, but Sid just deletes the messages as soon as they arrive.

He supposes it was never going to last. With several months’ distance he can at least admit that they were seeing each other, in the loosest sense of the expression. At the same time, there was nothing of romance in what they had. They didn’t go on dates or make love. They didn’t tell anyone else they were together. They barely spent any time with each other that didn’t involve hockey or getting their dicks out. They didn’t even—

They never kissed.

And what’s worse is that Geno had seemed to want it, if only a little. He was always leaning into Sid’s space like he was asking for something that Sid couldn’t give him. The way he _looked_ at Sid sometimes stole his breath.

But apparently, the whole thing meant nothing to him, as if it was only a bit of embarrassing history he could sweep under the carpet for the sake of—of _self-improvement_. Geno didn’t care.

So Sid resolves to be the same way. Their five years of fumbling would have to be put away in a box labelled _Young and Foolish_.

He allows himself one good cry about it on a day when his brain is almost crystal-sharp. He plows through a tub of peanut butter Häagen-Dazs, and sifts and sorts the memories.  After he’s done being miserable and he’s washed his face, all he wants is a hard, punishing run down the road.

Instead, he relegates himself to a walk around his property at dusk. On the other side of the lake, he spots a white-tailed deer, alone, picking through the tall grasses and dipping its head to drink from the mirrored water’s surface. The ripples don’t reach Sid’s side of the shore, but smooth back into the sapphire lake.

Casual sex with a teammate is ridiculous and insignificant, he decides. There are plenty of things in life that can make him happy.

“Are you feeling better?” His mom asks him the next Sunday with a cautious, tiny smile--wiping a plate dry as Sid washes.

He doesn’t tell her that it still varies day-to-day, hour-to-hour. Yesterday, he woke to a pounding in his head like a sledgehammer on a shipping container. “Kind of, yeah,” he says. He’ll take a nap in a few hours and then listen to a few chapters of an audiobook with the windows open to let in the breeze.

“That’s good,” she says. Outside in Sid’s yard, Taylor and their dad are mucking around with some hockey equipment. Their laughter carries into the house.  “You know we always worry.”

 


	6. strip down, then we'll talk it over

“So how does it feel?”

It’s a question Sid has been asked dozens of times in the past months, but he’s happy to hear it from one of the team’s trainers for once, and not the usual parade of neurologists.

He finally made a successful lap around the rink, determined not to falter, faint, or vomit. So long as he can manage that much, he can be in control.

The return from a long summer is always strange for Sid. After months of salty-fresh air and a sleep schedule that resembles nothing of responsibility, Pittsburgh doesn’t ever feel quite right. It’s like an old pair of shoes, cold and worn.

It’s worse this year because he didn’t have hockey to lean on over the summer and doesn’t necessarily have it back now, even nine months after his diagnosis. But he has a plan.

He pops two Gravol before his skate test. He makes it all the way around—slower than he’s been in years—and forces himself to stay upright and focused.

“Not bad,” he says, swallowing down the bile and smiling, “Better, I think. Much better.”

The click of a pen, scribbling on paper, the fluorescent lights that are so, so bright. “That’s good. I think we can start working you back up to regular exercise, and get you some independent ice time. Supervised, of course.”

“Of course,” Sid parrots because he doesn’t want to nod.

* * *

 Throughout camp, Sid spends much of his time apart from the team. If they’re on the ice, he’s in the weight room. If they’re in the weight room, he’s jogging around the rink. He sees them sometimes for meals, all of them scarfing down protein and carbs while he pretends to have an appetite. At least he joins them all for team-building activities and charity events. It’s still very different from the years before; it sucks, but Sid is determined.

He floats around in a comforting pocket of French Canadians, who dim the lights when he comes to visit and tease him on days when all he can stomach is chocolate cake and protein shakes. They’re a warm little flock of well-meaning concern, and between them and Mario’s family, it takes a long time for Sid to notice that Geno is _mad_ at him.

“Is Geno doing alright?” Sid has no idea who to ask, so he goes to Nealer, hoping for some clarity.

Nealer pauses with his breakfast sandwich halfway to his mouth. “Yeah, why?”

For the most part, Geno had been absent from Sid’s line of sight for weeks. He might not have noticed at all, since _no one_ has been a real constant so far this year while the trainers have him sequestered away, but he’d ended up next to Geno at a fundraiser the day before, and Geno had been snappish and sullen. He’d gritted his teeth when Sid tried to ask how landscaping around his house was going. And then he'd walked away without another word.

“No reason,” Sid says, “just wondering.”

Nealer gives him a funny look, and then decides for himself why he thinks Sid is asking. Sid follows Nealer’s gaze to where Geno is cheerfully shoving his way into the line for hashbrowns. “His knee is all healed up and he’s doing great. No worries, Sid.”

Sid nods, and shoves the last two bites of his meal into his mouth all at once.

“Are _you_ doing okay?” Nealer asks, eyes narrowed.

He wishes the guys would stop asking that and trust him instead. He's impatient enough as it is. Nothing matters more than hockey; he’ll get there when he gets there. It’s only September. “I’m great,” he says through a mouthful.

Nealer doesn’t really look like he believe Sid, but he says, “Glad to hear it, bud. Hey, if—”

“Thanks. Gotta go hit the bike for a few.” Sid balls up his napkin and escapes before anything else can be said. The less anyone dwells on it, the better.

The season starts on a Western Canadian roadie that Sid has to stay home for. He watches Geno collect points and penalties on the big-screen in the Lemieux living room with a bowl of baby carrots and longs to be out there as well. No one has to tell him that Geno is going to have a good year—Sid is watching it happen and it gets him hot under the collar like always.

They come back for the home opener, win one, lose two, and then hit the road again. Sid spends every single second the training staff will let him pounding the treadmill or lifting weights. He divides his ice time into perfect halves for skating and shooting. “I’m doing better,” he tells anyone who asks, and eventually they believe it.

He’s allowed to go on the road trip at the end of October since the team will have a lot of down-time between Toronto and San Jose. And he’s close. He’s so close. His theory about throwing himself into training is _working_. More often than not he’s feeling clear-headed and level, and now he even has a tentative return date.

Halloween is a noisy affair an hour up the highway into San Francisco where they can avoid Sharks fans. The club is pulsing and so is Sid’s head, everything a barrage of purple-white-green-red-orange, but he’s there to prove that he really is feeling better. The team couldn’t rent out the whole club so  last-minute, but they managed to pin down the entire mezzanine level, and—given the nature of the festivities—everyone has some level of anonymity behind the cheap party masks they’ve been outfitted with.

Sid spends most of the night in a booth upstairs with a rotating cast of girls in small, tight costumes.  None of them have any idea who he is, but they know that whoever lies beyond the velvet rope ought to be important.

The majority of the women only sit next to him until they determine that he’s not worth the effort. A few bolder ones swing their smooth, bare legs over his lap and curl up in the space next to him, fluttering their eyelashes and whisper-shouting saccharine things in his ear. It’s nice to be wanted, though he doesn’t need distractions right now. After all, they’ve got a curfew set to get back on the bus by half past midnight.

In the midst of all of it, Sid nurses one beer and tries to make it look like several. There’s a huge platter of hors d’oeuvres in the middle of the table. He’s pretty sure that he’s the only one making the pita chips disappear. There’s not a vegetable in sight, but he tries to steer clear of the generous pile of Reese cups.

He takes advantage of a moment when he’s been left abandoned and slips past the couplings of his flirting teammates to seek out a bathroom.

Geno is at the bar, alone in the crowd, a row of shots in front of him. Sid weaves his way through, suddenly filled with determination to fix things before October passes into November. He won’t have anything fucking up his game even if it makes his knees shake to contemplate direct confrontation.

Sid watches as Geno knocks back the six shots—a rainbow of red to violet—with his hat on backwards and his gold mask perched above his forehead, everything about him strong lines. The drinks disappear like lightning in his mouth and Sid is stunned for a moment with how strangely mature Geno looks, even with such vibrantly-dyed liquor between his fingers.

Or maybe the word is _handsome_.

“Bar special,” Geno says as he smacks the last shot glass rim-down on the bar, the most he’s said to Sid in weeks outside of ‘pass tape’ and ‘move’. Then he turns his attention onto Sid and it’s like a ten-foot tidal wave hitting him, deadly and inevitable. “Too sweet for me.”

“Are you doing okay?” Sid asks. His voice comes out rough, so he clears his throat. His heart is pounding. “I want to make sure we’re— _you’re_ —uh, having a good season.”

Geno laughs, and then busies himself with fishing a crumpled handful of bills from his pocket, which he slaps onto the counter. Then he cocks his head at Sid and smiles—close-lipped—in a way that doesn’t reach his eyes.  

“Sid, you’re best captain. _My_ captain. Follow you anywhere.” To that, Sid opens his mouth to utter a standard gratitude. “But you shitty friend.”

It smacks him right where he didn’t know it’d hurt. Geno disappears in an instant, and Sid can’t say anything in response.

He spends the rest of a night in a daze. Part of him is irritated: Geno is the one who wanted to end things with _him_. The other, more prominent thing he feels is just overwhelming guilt. It was childish of him to ignore Geno all summer long. He’s got his excuses, sure, but they’re flimsy in retrospect.

After a sleepless night, haunted by the hollow ring of Geno’s laugh, Sid decides that there’s nothing to be done about it for now. He doesn’t want to talk it out, and clearly neither does Geno. What Geno wanted—what he surely _wants_ —is hockey.

That, Sid can do.

* * *

 The game against the Islanders. The game near the end of November. The game when _Sid comes back_.

He figures in on two goals and two assists for the shutout, and determines that he was right: he can play with a headache if he keeps it to himself. He even scores on the power play with Geno. Everything is coming up roses. The hockey is electric. He feels _good_.

But his luck only lasts for eight games and twelve points, and then suddenly the bottom falls out.

“I wish you hadn’t hid this from us,” Mario says as he cleans Sid’s vomit from the stairs with an enormous wad of paper towels and some watered-down bleach. Sid perches on the steps above, his head crashing and spinning, holding himself together by a thread.  He can hear Nathalie in the hallway on the phone to the trainers. He’s out for sure. He can’t write it off as a flu virus.

“I’m sorry,” Sid repeats. His hands are shaking.

Mario’s face is only full of kindness as he looks up, when he should be furious or disappointed. “It’s hard for hockey players to be out with an injury. You know, every day I spent trying to get better from all my health problems, all I could think of was the ice. There are still some days when Nathalie has to tell me I did the right thing.” He rips off another few squares of paper, and tosses the soiled ones to the side. The house is probably quiet, but Sid keeps hearing a noise like a church bell tolling and rattling the inside of his head. “But it was probably easier for me because there was so much _else_ I had to look forward to. Sometimes we worry that there’s nothing keeping you grounded except for hockey.”

“I’ve got more than hockey,” Sid says, although it’s a half-lie. He has his parents, and Taylor, and his French-only lunch dates, but he knows that Mario probably means something else. He’d be irked at the meaning of life being boiled down to romantic relationships any other day, but right now he just feels as alone as Mario thinks he is.

“You can take it as a challenge if you like, but you need more to live for than a game.”

Hockey had been good enough for many men before Sid, so it could be good enough for him too.   He had to be the best, no matter the cost. Yet he nods to Mario in agreement. And then his brain swims and his stomach lurches and Mario holds out the entire roll of paper towels to him until Sid settles again. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright, Sid,” Mario says, “you just need more time.”

* * *

 The Penguins play straight through New Year’s, and Sid misses the chance to ring in 2012 with the guys on a red-eye back from New Jersey because his doctors insist he stay in Pittsburgh.

They have a two-day break after losing four in a row, and Sid is helpless to stop the streak, so he does what he can and tries to get other aspects of his life in order. Sid accepts an invitation to Duper’s house for an evening of bitching and beer, preceded by a potluck of modest proportions. He brings the salad, swallows his pride, and seeks advice.

“If you did something uh, kind of mean to someone really important to you,” he says as he swirls his forkful of lettuce in the vinaigrette pooled on his plate, “how do you make up for it?”

Everyone at the dining table freezes for a moment, and stares. He expected as much, but it’s still unnerving to have eight pairs of eyes all focused on him. Then all of the sudden, guys are reaching into their wallets and passing bills down to Tanger, who is grinning.

“And none of you motherfuckers believed me,” Tanger says, and pockets the cash.

Sid tries to be a good sport about it. There’s been more than one bet about him over the years.

“What were the terms of that one?” As soon as Sid says it, he doesn’t want to know, but—

“We were wondering why you were picking at your food for months,” Flower says.

Sid frowns. “You could have just _asked_.” Although he wouldn’t have told them the truth.

“What’s her name?” Kuni asks, and Maureen smacks his arm.

It can’t hurt that the guys assume he’s having girl problems. He can’t very well say he’s having Geno problems, because the situation is too fraught with secrets. Still, he says, “That’s between us.”

A chorus of _ooh_ ing.  Vero and Catherine roll their eyes at each other, and then clink wine glasses.

Sid forces himself to keep a level gaze and not crawl under the table like he wants to. “So what should I do?”

“Do you think we know shit about the wily ways of women? We were all raised in the gross locker rooms of Canada, just like you.”

“Raised by wolves, really.”

“Sid was probably _born_ in a hockey rink—”

“So really women are mysterious—”

“ _Don’t_ listen to them, Sidney,” Carole-Lyne interrupts, “Women are _people_.” She casts a glare about the table and then turns back to him. “All you have to do is apologize. That’s it. Unless she asks you for something else after you say you’re sorry.”

Sid thinks about that. It couldn’t be that easy because he would have done it already. Only—he actually hasn’t tried to apologize at all. “Isn’t that too simple?”

“You’ve got the big boy bucks,” Tanger offers. “A truckload of roses could work, too. Diamonds? New shoes?”

“An _apology_ ,” repeats Carole-Lyne, and the other women nod when Sid looks at them.

“And that would work with anyone?” Sid asks.

“If it’s genuine, then yes,” Vero says.

Then Catherine adds with a smile and a toast of her glass, “The doting gifts can come later.”

Sid does think about Tanger’s advice (and _not_ about Flower’s suggestion—delivered on the way out to their cars with a salacious wink and a jovial arm around his shoulder—to fix the problem with sex, which Sid quickly dismissed). There’s nothing he could buy for Geno that Geno couldn’t get for himself.

Geno isn’t like him. Sid’s frugality is prime chirping material for his teammates, and much of his salary sits collecting interest in his bank account while he lives with Mario’s family. On the other hand, Geno spends injudiciously. If there’s something he wants, he buys it without much consideration. The rest of his money, he donates wherever he sees fit. And so there’s little that Sid can guess he could buy for Geno to mend what’s broken between them.

Therefore, he has to assume that the women were right.

Geno still doesn’t really want to talk to him. At best, Sid can’t get Geno alone, and he’ll stick around as long as someone else is there make small talk. At worst, Geno will pretend he didn’t hear Sid speak, and walk away.

So Sid waits for the right moment and worries about what to say.

The time comes after an 8-1 win against Tampa Bay at home, when Geno is flushed with the delight of a hat trick and an assist besides. Sid loves it when Geno is glowing like that; he’ll take it as a sign.

He snatches Geno’s coat sleeve on the way out to the parking lot and tows him down the hall a little bit. Geno sighs heavily when he sees that it’s Sid who grabbed him, and he crosses his arms, even though he can’t seem to manage a scowl. Hat tricks are magic like that.

“What, Sid?” Geno asks, his tone belying more amusement than annoyance.

“Can I talk to you?” Sid swallows, and steels himself. “I’ve got something I need to get off my chest.”

Geno scans his face, probably searching for malice, but then says, “not tonight. Busy. You take me for sushi on Monday, day after Columbus game, then we talk.”

Sid nods. “Okay, yeah.”

“You pay.”

“Of course,” Sid says seriously, and the corner of Geno’s mouth almost twitches up into a smile. Then he schools his expression once more and leaves.

The address that Geno texts to him on Monday is for a cozy Japanese restaurant downtown. The restaurant is not particularly large, and seats even fewer people because of the big burbling water feature in the center of the room. Their waiter is very attentive and makes no mention of Penguins or hockey, but Sid has the sense that Geno is a regular here. It’s odd that Sid has never been.

In the past, many businessmen have impressed upon Sid that he should deal with anything unpleasant before food arrives, but Sid is far too nervous for that. He lets Geno order a supreme sushi boat and a bottle of the most expensive sake, and beats around the bush, yammering about Dallas and Colorado, whose video material they’d reviewed as a group at morning practice. Geno demolishes tuna sashimi like it’s his job. Sid chews on an endless supply of edamame while his stomach squirms.

But eventually Geno gets full and asks for the rest of his boat to be packed to-go, and turns his complete attention to Sid.

It’s a bit unnerving, after so many months of near-silence, to have Geno stare him down like this. Sid’s chest gets hot under his shirt and he smoothes his hands over his thighs impulsively. Geno is the first to speak.

“You want talk,” Geno gestures with a _go on_ motion. “So talk.”

“Right,” Sid says, fumbling all of the speeches he’d scripted in his head, “sorry, I’m just—uh.” He grasps for his mental index cards. “First I want to say thanks. For carrying the team while I’m out. It means so much to me.” He tries to push his sincerity into the words in place of his anxiousness, though he assumes he mostly fails.

Geno’s brows relax from their scrunchy position.  “My team, too, Sid.”

“I know,” Sid blurts. “Of course, you’re right. But you know what I mean.”

Geno nods and sighs. “Yes. I’m take care of Penguins while you hurt.”

“Yeah, so thank you for that.”

Another blanket of awkwardness hangs over the table as Sid scrambles for what to say next.

“All you have to say?” Geno asks.

“No, it’s not. Just hold on, okay? It’s not easy for me,” Sid says, and Geno snorts.

Sid has tried out all kinds of different apologies in his head, some long-winded and mournful, others brash and full of expressive irritation. He can’t imagine that any of them will work, and he knows the more verbose he is, the less likely Geno will be to comprehend everything. There’s just one way to say it that Sid can be certain will convey his meaning. It’ll be hell to convey his emotion and sincerity, but the alternative is worse.

Sid takes a deep breath, and layers in as much remorse as he can without tearing up. “I’m sorry, Geno.”

Geno raises his eyebrows, and tilts his chin up. They stare at each other for a long pause. Sid has never really taken the time to wonder at the geometric shapes that make up Geno’s face, but he marvels at them now while he waits for a reaction.

“Yeah?” Geno finally replies.

“Yeah,” Sid agrees, and maybe it’s as simple as that.

Geno studies him another moment.

“What for?”

Sid blinks. “Pardon?”

“What _for?_ ”

“Uh,” Sid says, and he didn’t get this far in his planning. He was hoping that he’d say sorry, and then Geno would too, and they’d pat each other on the shoulder and part ways as if everything had miraculously gone back to normal. So Sid has to think of whatever behavior it is that Geno is most upset with him for. “I’m sorry that I didn’t talk to you over the summer,” he tries.

The waiter comes to the table with the bill, interrupting their charged conversation.  It’s bad timing but still a relief. Sid swipes his Amex through the machine, and jabs the button for a 20% tip instead of calculating a nice round number. Then the waiter leaves them with Geno’s sushi-laden Styrofoam box, a handful of mints, and tells them to take their time and have a great evening.

“Sid, you and me, what we do—”

“Stop,” Sid says, and actually has to grip the table for a second. They’re in public, but Sid has also been manfully shoving everything about _that_ deep down, repressing memories for over half a year. “I can’t talk about that. Sorry. I just can’t.”

“Okay fine,” Geno huffs, “but I have to say because maybe you don’t understand what I’m say when you get concussion.” He seems to center himself, and his eyes bore into Sid's. “Hard for me explain. Hockey most important to me.”

“I know,” Sid says quietly. “Me too.”

“Yes,” Geno draws the word out like a chirp, and that’s fair. Everyone knows that Sid is hockey-obsessed. It doesn’t even bear mentioning.  “But there’s things hockey players have to do. And have to _not_ do. I’m twenty five, twenty six this summer. Olympics coming up soon, too, and I want win more cups. Have to be smart. Have to do right thing,” Geno explains.

Sid knows all of that. He’d be ignorant if he didn’t understand the risk of what they had, and he should have probably ended it sooner himself. He didn’t want to, though, and it stings to have Geno lay it all out there. A professional can’t be fooling around with his teammates. “I get it.”

Geno frowns. “But some things I’m do better with you. Be teammate, be friend, score on power play, chirp guys; those things I do best if you around. And then in summer you don’t want to do, so I think ‘okay, fine, I can try do without Sid if I have to.’ But still I don’t get why. _Why_ you don’t want be around me.”

There’s no good way to say it without cutting himself open and spilling all his tenderness over the table between them, messy and embarrassing, but he tries.

“It…it _hurt_ , Geno. Everything then was so painful. I couldn’t even,” he swallows, recalling the hard times and the worse times and the fear that it would never end. “Most days I couldn’t even get up, and then after what you said to me there was barely a reason to try.” Then he pauses to compose a half-truth, one that will let him off the hook without saying too much.  “I needed some distance, I guess. Clear my head.”

“Your head clear now?” And Sid doesn’t miss the double-meaning. He has his date for a return, but still no one trusts him. For this, though, he has to give Geno a reason to believe that he’s willing to be attentive. To try.

“I miss you, Geno,” he says, and tucks his fingers under his legs so he’s not tempted to reach across the table and grasp Geno’s hand. “Can we hang out some more? Will you talk to me at practice?”

Geno’s expression goes soft and fond. “I’m miss, too.”

“So--friends?” Sid asks.

“Yes, okay,” Geno relents, “friends.”

* * *

 A hockey schedule doesn’t afford much time to socialize. Sid has no idea how they did it before, but during their ten-day homestay, they can only make it out once—to Primanti’s for sandwiches.

The lunch itself is really enjoyable. Geno makes fun of Sid for getting turkey instead of roast beef, steals half of his pickle, and sips his beer with contentment. Sid loves it—feels warm all over with how easily they fall into companionship. He can prattle on about anything he wants, from his hopes for the upcoming Pirates season, to a song he heard on the radio on the way over, to distaste for the Flyers, to an advertisement he saw for a Game of Thrones TV series, and Geno doesn’t mind.

It’s nice to bounce off of someone else’s opinion once in a while, even though Geno disagrees with him on a lot of things. After they split up to go take care of different errands, Sid can’t help the spring in his step that lasts all day.

This time, when Sid is ready to play hockey again, it’s different.

His nausea is gone completely, and his headaches only appear rarely, easily done away with after a single Tylenol. He also feels lighter than last time, more comfortable. He’s not afraid to look Geno in the eye, and the prospect of being near to his teammates and helping them win is exciting.

It's not about overcoming his injury. It's about supporting the team. And when they play the Rangers at the Garden, smack in the middle of March, Sid is _ready_.

“I’m pick last two times,” Geno says in the locker room after a 8-4 win against Winnipeg a few days after Sid’s return, planning their next hangout. He towels his hair roughly, and he’s in good spirits. Sid has four points to Geno’s five, and he hasn’t scored any goals yet, but he doesn’t much care as long as they’re winning. “Your turn.”

Sid groans internally. They don’t have any consecutive days off for the rest of the season and while Sid has a lot of energy, Geno has been playing all the regular games in his stead. He probably just wants to sleep. “Are you going to see Gonch when we’re in Ottawa this weekend?”

“Yes,” Geno says, “you come?”

Sid shrugs a shoulder. He doesn’t want to interrupt Russian time.

“You come,” Geno decides, “but still have to pick something later.”

He still hasn’t thought of anything after they get thrashed by the Senators on Saturday, but it’s good to see Gonch and his family.

Something inside Geno unwinds when he gets to spend time with people who remind him of home. He cracks a lot of jokes in Russian which Sid has no hope of understanding, but the language does remind him of a specific part of his past, for which he has to excuse himself to the bathroom in order to get control of his traitorous heart. It’s still a nice late-night snack before they have to pack it in, and Geno is smiling the whole time through.

The end of March rolls around, and Sid invites Geno over for room service in Buffalo. They eat on the foot of Sid’s bed, and Geno says, “This doesn’t count.”

Sid rolls his eyes with a mouthful of chicken.

“What doesn’t count?” Duper asks from his bed. He’s flipping channels on the TV and his own tray of food sits half-eaten next to him.

Sid explains, but later after Geno has gone back to his own room and Sid has left their trays out in the hallway, Duper gives Sid an odd look as they’re getting ready for bed.

“ _I’m glad you two are good friends_ ,” Duper says in measured French.

“ _Me too_ ,” Sid replies and he refuses to feel embarrassed about any of it. In the past month, he’s realized that his friendship with Geno means a lot to him. Duper just smiles and lets Sid crawl under the covers without more discussion.

The season comes to a close, and Geno says he’s not counting either of their lunches at home, even the illicit pre-playoffs pizza at Geno’s kitchen counter.

And then they lose to the Flyers in six games.

Sid feels overwhelmingly guilty. He hits the exercise bike in the Lemieux home like it’s going out of style, trying to get the sense that he’s _done_ something, instead of waste a whole year trapped by the whims of his brain. He doesn’t even touch dessert for three days, which leads to Nathalie and the kids baking him an entire batch of cookies.  That just makes him feel a different kind of guilt. If he cries a little bit while he eats his misshapen peanut butter chocolate-chunk cookies alone on his couch, then that’s a secret he’ll just have to keep to himself.

_still owe me))))_ , Geno texts him the day after locker cleanout, and he’s right, Sid doesn’t want to leave this year like he left the last one. He needs to end it on a high note, so he gets his laptop out for a little research.

“Where we going?” Geno asks with a big grin in the passenger seat of Sid’s car.

“Put your seatbelt on.”

Sid had thought longingly of the Carnegie Museum or one of the war memorials, but if he ended up towing a disinterested Geno along, it might have ruined the experience. He thinks both of them will enjoy the Phipps Conservatory. Sid didn’t like pulling the name recognition card, but their spring exhibition had closed and the summer one wouldn’t start until Saturday, so on the phone he’d had no choice but to mention his place of employment.

They sign some things for the conservatory’s curator, though most of the botanists and landscapers are uninterested, and then they have a sneak preview of the Fountains of Youth exhibit all to themselves.

“Not expect this,” Geno says when they stop in the Palm Court and Sid pulls out the shared lunch that he’d stowed in his backpack.

“What’d you expect?” Sid hands Geno a sandwich and a handful of napkins. He doesn’t want either of them to get any food on the floor, but he’d been told that the café would be closed, and they didn’t mind if he brought a snack. Sid got the impression that they didn’t care _what_ Sid did so long as he left the flowers alone, but he also didn’t think they expected him to bring Geno with him.

“Probably baseball game,” Geno says, “or go hiking.”

Those both sound really good to him, but, “We’ve both done those things, though. I wanted to find something new.”

They have two ham-cheese-tomato each, and then Sid shares the last of his cookies. Geno likes the Broderie Room a lot. He makes noises about how he could use the same landscaping for his house, and Sid has to admit that it’d work with the architecture. The South Conservatory makes Sid think that maybe it would be nice to train somewhere tropical for a few weeks, just to make the most of his clean bill of health and ability to spend as much time in direct sunlight as he wants. He’s grown unspeakably pale in the past two years.

In the Victoria Room, they stop. Sid doesn’t know if it’s supposed to be misty in there, or if the water feature still needs adjustments, but they’re paused next to the fountain when Geno takes Sid’s hand.

Sid jolts, and looks around, but they’re alone. He can feel his heartbeat right into his fingertips.

“Don’t leave me over summer,” Geno says with sincerity that Sid is too nervous to analyze.

So instead he approximates a chuckle and extracts his hand, shoves it in the pocket of his jeans. “C’mon, G, we’ve both gotta go home. Spend time with family? Train?”

Geno grunts, irritated. “No, I mean don’t be stranger. Don’t be bad friend.”

“Oh,” Sid says. “Oh, of course, sorry. I’ll text you for sure. Um, and call. If you want.” Somehow he feels even more nervous now, because maybe he’s still not forgiven after all. “You know I’m sorry about that, right? I was in a bad place—well, you know. I won’t do it again.”

Geno looks at him. Just looks, but it feels as if he’s frozen Sid in place like a statue. “Promise?”

“Yeah, of course,” Sid says, “I promise.”

 


	7. tidal delays

The summer of 2012 drags like sticky, hot tar, and Sid feels like he’s drowning under the weight of it.

He has too much energy after a short season, and despite training as hard as he can, suffering through cardio and weights that makes his lungs and his legs burn, he starts packing on useless pounds like no one’s business. He tries to cut all the extraneous parts of his diet out to focus on protein and empty carbs, but Nova Scotia is sweltering this summer, and trips to the air-conditioned sanctuaries of DQ and 7-11 are irresistible. He debates buying a Margaritaville just so that he can dribble some lemon on crushed ice and pretend it’s a treat. He doesn’t, though, because it feels kind of pathetic. Instead, he shows up to training every other day with vanilla still tacky on his lips and faces Andy’s disappointed eyebrows.

He reasons with himself that the weight will melt away by the time the season starts, though with the weather the way it is, it should be gone already.

Sid goes fishing, but catches nothing. He mows his parents’ lawn until it turns brown from the heat. He tries to stain his back deck, then gives up and hires a contractor.

Geno grows quickly irritated with regular phone conversations and insists they use Skype. And Sid’s willing to try, both for Geno’s sake and for the truly offensive cost of calls to Russia.

“You cut your hair!” is the first thing Sid exclaims when the video chat connects. Geno’s laughter is surprised and bright, crinkling his eyes, and Sid supposes that maybe there’s some merit to how facial expressions aid in communication.

“Yours all long,” Geno replies with a cheeky grin.

Sid sweeps it off his face self-consciously. “I’ll get around to it.”

Geno tilts his head, considering. Then he shrugs. “Looks okay, but it’s not good flow.”

“Oh my God, shut up,” Sid mutters, cheeks burning—but maybe that’s just because the fan in his office is on the fritz again.

He has regular Skype sessions with Geno, although Geno still sends him pictures by text and email—photos of things like absurd statues and his mama’s cooking and what Magnitogorsk looks like in the summertime sun. Sid treasures the snapshots and stores them in an innocuous untitled folder on his desktop. He doesn’t really look at them, but he likes to know they’re there. He even sends a few of his own: the view of the lake and his family at his dinner table. It’s nice to still feel connected to Geno because it makes him feel connected to hockey, to Pittsburgh, even though neither of them are there.

Then Sid gets word from the players’ union that the CBA negotiations are delayed, and almost immediately the rumors start flying.

“Is really lockout?” fuzzy, pixelated Geno asks, chewing on his lip.

“I don’t know,” Sid sighs. “Maybe.”

“You don’t know? Canada hockey _prince_?” Geno chirps. “Can’t call other royal family and ask?”

“You know that’s not how it works.” Most days, he tries not to encourage Geno’s teasing.  He hasn’t had much success so far. It’s mid-afternoon in Nova Scotia and Sid’s still a little frustrated from a long run around the lake, but it’s late in Russia. Geno doesn’t seem sleepy, but pensive. Sid is going to melt an ice cube on his forehead once Geno has decided either to sleep or go out for the night. He’s not made for enduring hot weather, and nor is he made for difficult discussions as both captain and friend.

“Sid,” Geno regards him with trepidation, “I want play hockey. Even if there’s no NHL this year. I think Metallurg will—“

“It won’t come to that,” Sid says quickly, ignoring the frisson of fear that prickles the back of his neck. The last time Geno played for his hometown team, they didn’t want to let him go. He can’t face a reality where he’ll never see Geno again. In that sense, he understands Metallurg’s jealousy very well.

Geno watches him with his lips pressed together, then says, “You can come too, maybe?”

“Don’t worry, G, they’re always like this. They’re trying to fake each other out, but they’ll all sign before the deadline, and we’ll look dumb for running around like—“

“Like chicken with no head.”

“Exactly,” Sid tries to smile reassuringly. “You’ll see.”

Only, mid-September rolls around, and then there _is_ a lockout.

Sid is on a golf course in Pittsburgh when he gets the news. He takes a call from Pat with instructions to avoid anyone not on the union-side of the negotiations, which is virtually impossible since he’s out golfing _with_ Mario.

He lives at Mario’s _house_.

“Maybe it’s time to start looking for a place of your own, eh?” Pat says lightly. “I’ll send you a real estate agent. For now, maybe you should go back to Cole Harbour.”

That’s how Sid finds himself suffering through October back at the lake house, trying to manage a roster of Penguins all dressed up with nowhere to go, a real estate agent trying fruitlessly to get him to a establish a list of needs and wants, and a text from Geno that reads: _I sign with Magnitogorsk. You come?_

At that point, swallowing around the lump in his throat, Sid wishes that he’d eaten even more ice cream over the summer. And cake. And cheeseburgers. And that he’d gone with his parents to the Okanagan winery tour he sent them on in August. And that he’d taken a real vacation and said _screw this_ to his cardio schedule.

Fuck it, he’ll drive to Timmies right _now_ for a dozen honey crullers and a large triple-triple.

So, what? Sid either plays in the Kontinental Hockey League or he waits in Canada for word from the NHLPA?

Sure enough, within a few days there is a list in his email of a dozen or more European teams who are interested in signing him to a temporary contract. Metallurg Magnitogorsk is one of them.

“I’ll do Geno’s team,” Sid tells Pat on the house phone.  He’s pacing the floor in the socks he got for his birthday, stomach turning because he’s never really gotten to _choose_ his team before. How can he know it’s the right choice? “Tell Metallurg I’ll play for them.”

“Actually, there’s been some issues with your insurance,” Pat says.

“What?”

“Yeah, I figured you’d want Malkin’s team, so I already started the process. Your insurance won’t cover you in Russia. If you wanted to play in the UK, that’d be no problem.” Pat types something on the other line, clicks a few times. “There’s a couple other minor issues, but the insurance thing—no go.”

“Well find me some better insurance, then,” Sid grumbles.

“I’m working on it, but for now you’re just gonna have to sit tight.” Pat pauses, and then says, “Scratch that. There’s something you can do.”

Sid will theoretically do anything to keep the sport alive in North America, but he wishes he wasn’t so eager to agree to Pat’s idea. He ends up darting around to meet with NHLPA lawyers and representatives to discuss the CBAs—an ugly triangle of flights between Halifax, Toronto, and New York. Sid spends more time in airports than he does flying. Customs and security is a breeze when he flies charter with the team, but now he’ll spend up to an hour in line for the TSA, only to find out that the flight’s been delayed or cancelled. He develops a hatred for Toronto Pearson and switches often enough between JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark that he gets lost all the time.

He becomes really good at shoving his nose in a book to avoid the lamenting of hockey fans who see him sitting at the gate. He flies first-class and the days blur together when he’s wearing the same dark blue business suit all the time and every hotel he stays at is uniformly bland. Lawyers are really into steak dinners. Sid just wants burgers and beer and the jocular conversations of his Penguins teammates.

He still Skypes with Geno, either before his pre-game nap or when Geno is re-heating pelmeni in a frying pan late at night. Sid keeps an eye on the scores. He catches a few games on his TV when he’s at home, breathless as he watches Geno out there on the ice where Sid is desperate to be. It’s a comfort to know that Geno is doing well in Russia, but everything else in Sid’s life just fucking _drags_.

“Mind if I sit?”

Sid is in a cramped pizza place in New York, killing time until his next flight. And some guy in a leather jacket parks himself opposite Sid without waiting for an answer.

There’s no recognition in his eyes, though. No spark of hockey fan delight. Nothing insidious lurks there. “Uh yeah, go ahead,” Sid says.

“Thanks,” the man says, then takes a huge bite of his cheese slice and sighs delightedly. “Shit. I am totally beat.”

“Rough day?” Sid asks, a bit curious, mostly polite.

“Understatement,” he says through a mouthful of pizza. “You think you’re doing well at your job, and then some rich asshole fucks you over.” He gives Sid an efficient once-over, though it still makes Sid warm. He had an internal debate at the hotel about whether he should give up appearances and just wear sweatpants on the plane, but he’s glad now that he slicked his hair and went for the suit anyway. “No offense if you’re a rich asshole.”

“Uh, no, I understand,” Sid says.

The man smiles at him, and he’s charming, a little bit.  Sid is pretty sure that few people can be charming while eating a greasy slice as if the pizza is a miracle in and of itself. He’s sandy-blonde with an edge of stubble along his jaw.  His eyes sparkle like he has a secret.

The man finishes his pizza and wipes his hand on his thigh, then offers it to Sid to shake. “Thanks for sharing your table. I’m Ethan.”

“I’m S— _Adam_. Hi,” he clasps Ethan’s hand.

“Not from around here, I’d guess,” Ethan says and Sid nods. “Well, Adam, I’m going for another slice. Can I get you one?”

“Sure,” Sid says, and reaches for his wallet, but Ethan waves him off.

They eat two more slices each, and Ethan drinks a bottled root beer in such a way that Sid is sure it's intentionally sexy. It’s nice to hear about someone else’s problems for once. Ethan does layouts for a bridal magazine. “I have four older sisters, so I knew more than your average schmuck coming into the job. And now that I’ve been working there for a year, I like to consider myself something of an expert,” Ethan explains, talking with his hands. “I can tell my ivory from my cream, you know?”

Sid nods, though he’s sure he couldn’t point out the difference if he tried.

“Right, but then the owner of our publishing parent just happens to come by the graphics department in his ugly brown three-piece—I don’t mean his toupee, because that’s its own story—and he decides he wants everything centered. Which is _wrong_ ,” Ethan says.

Sid finds himself laughing along with Ethan’s story, and another one he has about tourists, but then he looks at the Coca-Cola clock on the wall and realizes that he’s got to hop in a cab right away. “Shit, I’ve gotta go catch a flight.” He starts gathering up his jacket and suitcase.

“You got a pen?” Ethan asks, and Sid nods and passes the Sharpie he always keeps in his pocket. Where’s his passport? “Here,” Ethan scrawls something on a paper napkin and hands it to Sid, “Next time you’re in town.”

“Thanks, uh,” Sid turns the napkin around. It’s a phone number, signed with _Pizza Ethan_ and a devastating lopsided heart.

“Think about it,” Ethan winks, “but go, or you’ll be late and I’ll have to let you stay at my apartment for the night.”

Sid clutches the napkin in his hand until his cab drops him off at JFK departures, and it burns in his grasp. But in the stark fluorescent lighting of the check-in line, its blatant scratchy lines seem obvious and incriminating. He crumples it into a tight ball and drops it in the nearest trash can.

The next week in Toronto he has some kind of informal national shinny game, comprised of the guys who didn’t pick up European contracts for the lockout. It’s a friendly competition, and chirps are flying. Some players are in better shape than others. With no crowd and no referees, eventually the game devolves into a trick-shot competition. Sid doesn’t win, but it feels so good to be playing something that resembles hockey that he doesn’t even care.

He misses watching Metallurg play, so he gets Geno to give him a run-down on Skype after he’s delivered an abridged version of the recent Canadian gossip. Geno looks exhausted, but happy, and he seems to light up from within. Sid gets it. He feels the same after nearly a whole day of goofing around on the ice, even if he dreads the next inevitable meeting with the union.

“I hope this whole contract mess is over soon,” Sid confesses. He spent all morning and early afternoon convincing everyone that the wait would be over in no time at all, and now his own worries come spilling out of him before he can tell Geno anything to the contrary.

“Then you come play here,” Geno says like he’s said many times already, “No problems.”

A female voice calls for Geno off-screen in Russian, and then Sid glimpses a slim woman at the doorway in lingerie and what must be one of Geno’s nicer shirts hanging from her shoulders. Geno turns his head, and then looks back at the Skype window, eyes wide. “Sid—”

“Oh, hey, I’ve gotta go,” Sid says hurriedly, “Talk to you later.” He hangs up before Geno can get in another word. It’s only then that the emotion crashes through him—indescribable, but something bruising and blunt. Jealousy, probably, but also pain and regret and self-pity. It sits heavy in his belly, and he goes to dinner with the Canadian players in a hurt daze.

Geno—well, it’s not his business.

In the morning, Sid wakes up hard, hot, and dewy with sweat.

The dream hadn’t been an anomaly, but they’re rare. Geno had been gasping in his ear, full weight over Sid’s back and pressing him into the couch at the lake house while snow drifted silently outside. He was grinding against Sid, bare, his dick sliding slickly across Sid’s hole, over and over. “Just little bit,” Geno had been pleading, “Let me inside, please, Sid.” Sid had been begging, too.

After he jerks off and the fizzling in his limbs has faded, he’s irritated. The feeling lingers for the rest of the day. He’s upset with his subconscious for dragging him into unproductive fantasies. He’s angry with _himself_ for throwing out the number of the guy in New York. Even though it’s irrational, he’s pissed at Geno for—what? Sleeping with some Russian girl? He has no claim on Geno that isn’t tied to hockey. And there’s no fucking hockey right now.

Even if there were, Sid couldn’t do anything about Geno.

He suffers through a lunch meeting in downtown Toronto and then hits the treadmill at the rink while everyone is still splitting the rent for the weekend. He doesn’t set a timer—he just runs until he stops thinking about it. There’s not a damn thing else he can do.

Geno rings him on Skype the next day, but Sid ignores it and texts instead, _sorry can’t talk right now_. He’ll call back when he returns to Nova Scotia.

* * *

 Sid’s a little nervous going back into the room, but the noises from down the hall are jubilant and Sid wants to be back with the team. Even though he played the end of the last season, it feels like he’s been out for ages. _Two years_. Everything he’d been worrying about during the lockout—his family, the union, buying a house, Geno and his girl in Russia, Ethan and his pizza slices in New York—all of it seems irrelevant now.

“Yeah, baby, we’re back!” Tanger crows, and he and Flower sandwich Sid between them. He gets varying degrees of shoulder thumps and elbow nudges and fist bumps from all the guys. Duper buffs him on the chin, and Kuni smacks him in the center of his back. Geno hugs him with his whole body, wrapping him up bear-like, nearly lifting him off the ground and holding him until Sid has to pry himself away with helpless giggles.

They all pile onto the ice for drills and the mood is untouchably joyous, even as half of them finish the morning skate completely out of breath with no legs to stand on. There’s strength testing, and there’s physicals, and Sid isn’t quite at peak performance like he had been at the end of the summer, but his weight is where it should be and his cardio isn’t half-bad. The team caters a phenomenal lunch, and Sid tries to catch up with as much of the team as he can, settling back into his captain’s role with a new ease.

Everything is right again. Everything is _good_.

* * *

 The bar the team goes to the night before they fly to Philadelphia is having a Retro Night, playing the kind of eighties-nineties hits that Sid finds completely asinine, but most everyone else enjoys. There’s a couple guys up from Wilkes-Barre as part of an informal team-building situation, and they keep trying to sort everyone as Spice Girls.

“Letang is Scary Spice,” one of them blurts, and then whips around hoping that Tanger didn’t hear. He did, though, and he lifts his beer in cheers with a manic grin. There’s a scuffle as the kids scramble to look away and avoid the wrath.

“Shouldn’t we all be Sporty Spice?”

“Well _some_ of us are definitely the blonde one.”

“Baby Spice.”

Sid stops paying attention to the debate, and to the warbling renditions of _Girls Just Wanna Have Fun_ , because he only has eyes for Geno. Meanwhile, Geno only has eyes for a slim blonde halfway into his lap, her neckline pulled low and hair piled high, tracing her fingers over Geno's arms.

It’s not that Sid wants to be in the girl’s place. Geno has been paying plenty of attention to him and there’s no reason to crave more than he’s getting.  He doesn’t need Geno’s flirting or his wandering hands because he has Geno’s hockey, and that’s what he really wants. Fuck, he should be _over_ all of this by now.

“Sid?” Flower is saying, “Earth to Sid.”

Kuni says, “Ground control to Space Cadet Sidney,” and that sort of snaps him back to awareness.

“Sorry, uh,” Sid says, and then physically turns his body so he can’t stare at Geno trying to wheel.

Duper has definitely caught him, though. “Sid,” he says.  His face is all concern, but he graciously says nothing more. Sid doesn’t know what he’d reply anyway. “How am I going to prank you if we aren’t road roomies anymore, eh?”

“I’m sure you’ll figure out a way,” Sid says, and Flower barks a laugh.

“What makes you think we haven’t already?”

Sid doesn’t quite get away with it, though. Duper corners him before he leaves. “So about Geno.”

Sid’s heart jumps. “What about Geno?”

“Well,” Duper pauses, puts his hands on his hips and searches the ceiling, probably looking for the right way to put it, “I just don’t think it’d make things easy on you to be _interested_ in him.”

As if he doesn’t know that already. Sid laughs, but it rings hollow in his ears. He has to hope it’s convincing enough for Duper. “Oh, no, I was just thinking about line combinations. Geno’s head was in the way of me staring at the wall. The girl was pretty, though, right?”

“I guess so.” Duper looks uncertain.

“Come on, Pascal,” Sid jokes, “What do you take me for?”

Duper sighs. “You’re right, Sid, sorry.”

“See you tomorrow,” Sid says with a wave, and then he gets the hell out of there before his nervous sweating gives him away.

Sid lies awake for a hours with the same irritating line of synthesized music running through his head, and he tries to convince himself that he’s moved well past the thing with Geno. He’s an adult now. He’s got three different properties to look at with his real estate agent after Thursday’s game against Toronto. He owns stocks and a closet full of suits. He leads a team of guys who are mostly older than him.

Geno has long-since moved on. Now it’s Sid’s turn.

* * *

 He doesn’t remember the puck.

What he does remember is the ice under his gloves. He remembers Duper’s steadying hold on his elbow. He can recall the sensation of his skates hitting the rubber of the runway to the dressing room. And then everything becomes unclear, because the drugs they give him are _good_.

“Jesus, Sid, I’m sorry,” Brooksie says after the game is done, but Sid waves him off.

“No harm done.” It comes out blurry-sounding. His tongue feels swollen but he doesn’t think he’s drooling or anything too gross.

“I think there’s a _little_ harm done,” Flower pipes up, “Who’s gonna kiss you now? You’re gonna need _dentures_.”

“It’s not that bad.” The team won the game, and Sid is happy that they’re finishing off the month with fifteen straight wins. His face doesn’t matter so much if it’s the sacrifice for a streak like this.

Someone cups the uninjured side of his head. “How it feel?”

“Oh, Geno,” Sid looks up at him, but it takes some effort to get his eyes to focus. Geno is glowy around the edges. His hair looks very soft. “Hi. How are you?”

Geno clucks his tongue and says something in Russian that sounds a bit rude. Sid thinks he recognizes the swears, but it’s his tone that conveys everything.

“I’m fine, really,” Sid says.

“You have no _teeth_ ,” Geno protests, tilting Sid’s head so gently, so carefully.

“Yeah, but don’t worry,” Sid slurs, “I’m still very kissable.”

The whole room erupts into endless, howling, guffawing laughter.  Sid joins in with them, feeling glimmering bright, even though Geno is flushing scarlet right up to his ears.  He drops his hand and turns away.

When Sid is no longer high on painkillers, he’ll lament his altered state for giving the team the absolute worst kind of chirping fodder. Now he’ll surely have to deal with the mortification of lisping impersonations at every minor injury and inconvenience: _I’m still very kissable_.

* * *

 Geno seems to make it his mission to keep Sid from starving. He quickly becomes an expert in hearty broths and organic smoothies. Sid has to sit out the rest of the regular season games, which is admittedly frustrating. He deals with it by jerking off, working out, and lusting after solid food. If he’s very careful, he can have over-cooked macaroni on his left side if he mashes it against his molars with his tongue. It's pretty disgusting and he tries not to think about it.

“This fancy lobster soup, you like,” Geno says as he delivers the container to Sid, making a face. It smells fantastic—like the ocean and warmth—but it’s probably wretched to everyone else in the lounge. Sid pops the lid and lets it cool down for a minute.

He debates Boston’s defense with Geno for a while, complains about how few of Montreal’s penalties turned into effective powerplay chances last game, and they carefully skirt the topic of Geno’s stats with the Penguins this year compared to his trending scores with Metallurg. Talking with Geno is good. Sid values Geno’s opinion, knowing that he’s out there analyzing every moment of the game like Sid is—although maybe not as obsessively, since he still gets to _play_ most of the season. At the moment,  they’re both out with injuries. It's the third one for Geno.

“Whole team work hard,” Geno says when Sid takes a break from chatting to slurp a few spoonfuls of broth, carefully avoiding the chunk of lobster that floats like a maritime island in the middle. “Every day they try, wait for you come back.”

“I’m sorry I keep making you do this,” Sid winces.

“Do what?”

Sid shrugs one shoulder. “You know, taking care of everything. Since I’m injured. Again.”

Geno’s expression darkens a shade. “Not your fault. I’m hurt too—is _my_ bad play make me this way?”

“No, I _know_ it isn’t,” although they both must be facing some pretty bad karmic imbalance. Sometimes he wonders if it’s the price for dreams come true. “But thanks anyway. For all of it.”

“My team too,” Geno says, irritation creeping into his voice.

“Of course it is. Geno we,” he swallows, “We’re in this together. I just mean that I feel bad everyone is out there without me again.”

They stare at each other, and in his mind’s eye, Sid traces the contoured shapes of Geno’s face. But then Geno ducks his head and his shoulders shake, “Sorry,” he says, voice quavering with mirth, “Can’t take you serious when you sound like that.”

“You jerk,” Sid frowns, but Geno’s silent laughter bursts out of him, and Sid is a swirling mess of embarrassment and affection.  He’s not as careful to enunciate when there aren’t any cameras rolling nearby. Geno was the last holdout for chirping him about his lisping. Sid supposes the circle is complete now. “Screw you, asshole, I’m going to sit and eat my soup somewhere else,” Sid snaps, which only brings forth more laughter because the sentence is full of sibilants.

He stands, and Geno grabs his wrist. “No, no, stay,” he says, eyes bright and a little teary.

“Why should I?” Sid feels the smile tugging at the corner of his lips. Though if Geno says it’s because he’s _still very kissable_ , Sid is never coming back to the rink again.  He’ll probably request a trade to the other side of the country. Arizona is hot; no one will ever know that the permanent blush is from anything other than the weather.

“Faceoffs need work,” Geno says, and pulls at Sid’s wrist until he sits back down, “You tell me how you cheat and I do next game I play.”

“I don’t _cheat_ ,” Sid rolls his eyes, but he obliges anyways.  

After he’s finished with the soup, Geno goes with him to the weight room—kind of like an escort.  Sid finds he enjoys it too much to say anything about how he doesn’t need a babysitter to walk him down the hall. Lunch wasn’t enough to satiate him, of course. He’s taken to having a snack break once every two hours, as his body burns through sustenance almost as soon as he eats. His stomach growls audibly in the hallway.

“What’s first thing you eat when you have teeth?” Geno asks.

Sid’s thought about it a lot. Every day, his answer is different. “Probably a steak? Or corn on the cob.” Those are his standard answers. “Or maybe just like a big bowl of fruit?”

Geno raises his eyebrows.

“And dessert.”

“Yes,” Geno nods, “Big birthday cake this year for you.”

“I was thinking I’ll skip the cake and have strawberry-rhubarb crumble instead.”

“You have both, don’t lie.”

They pause outside the door, and for a moment Sid thinks Geno is going to dive in for a hug, which have been more frequent as of late. Sid doesn’t mind them at all because Geno is always careful not to bump his jaw and he doesn’t grapple like he would in a celly. Geno is a very physically affectionate guy with his friends and teammates, and Sid likes to be a part of that. Sid doesn’t usually want his personal space invaded, but it’s always been different with people he’s close to.

Instead of a hug, though, Geno leans in and touches Sid’s bottom lip. He pinches it gently and pulls it away from Sid’s teeth, examining the mess of wires and stitches in there. Sid goes abruptly hot. He wants to back away, but he can’t move. Or breathe, for that matter.

“Hurts?” Geno asks.

“No,” Sid rasps, because it’s more of a dull throb now, and the entire ache is in being unable to open his mouth all the way.

Geno hums, lets go of his lip, then bumps their foreheads together and wraps his arms loosely over Sid’s shoulders. Sid tries to say something like _Geno, stop, we’re in the hall_ , but all that comes out of him is a shaky exhale.

“Okay,” Geno says, breaking away after a few seconds that feel like an era to Sid, “You go train, nap time for me.”

“That’s not fair,” Sid manages to say.

Geno shrugs, “No.” And then he walks away, hands in his pockets, a bounce in his step. “Bye, Sid!” He calls.

“Bye,” Sid replies, and shakes himself free of the moment.

* * *

 “It looks fucking goofy,” Sid tells Dana, catching sight of himself in the reflective surface of the glass.

“If you wanna talk _goofy_ —” Dana starts.

“Nope. My gear is not a performance issue.”

Dana sighs and clearly shelves the new-jock-new-pads debate for another day. “Well, it’s the price you’re going to have to pay if you want to play.”

“Nice fishbowl, Sid!” Tanger jeers as he skates past.

“Hey, it’s not a fishbowl,” Dana says to Sid, probably trying to be comforting, but it doesn’t matter because it _looks_ like a fishbowl.

Sid doesn’t know what to call the jaw-guard contraption, but he immediately hates it. He wants to help his team through the playoffs. The cost to do so is ridiculous.

The chirps from his teammates fade quickly, but the other teams they play can’t seem to get _enough_ mileage out of it. Sid can’t even grit his teeth in frustration. It’s annoying as hell, he’s hungry and thirsty for the entire duration of his time on the ice, and every time his mouth guard falls out, he has to poke his fingers awkwardly through his mask to try and shove it back in.

As soon as he’s not thinking about the jaw thing, though, he’s flying on the ice.

When everything else in Sid’s life is a mess, when he doesn’t know what he feels or how to take the next step, there’s always hockey. Sid can’t always win at the trials and tribulations that the universe throws his way, but he can win a faceoff, a goal, a game. He feels the support of his team around him. He’s lifted up by them. He cries in the room between periods when he gets his hat trick against Ottawa, and the team is near. Things get scrappy and heated with the Bruins, and the guys are there.

The Penguins do well until they don’t, and Boston summarily knocks them out of the conference finals. It stings, but Sid is thinking forward to the next season before they even hit the showers. There’s work to be done still and he’s excited to do it.

Geno sends him a picture of some kind of dessert for every day of the summer break.

Sid gets his teeth fixed and his hair cut and puts a down-payment on a house in Sewickley.

 


	8. from the peak it's glittering, gold

Sid can’t move into his new house right away. When he buys the place in the middle of the summer, it’s bare-walled and empty apart from some appliances, and he really doesn’t feel like returning to Pittsburgh early to furnish it. Then during training camp, he has the whole place worked over by a small army of contractors. The beige walls get painted white, the carpets swapped for hardwood flooring, and all the lighting fixtures are replaced by their energy-efficient counterparts. By then, he’s too distracted by hockey to care about furniture, so he hires some decorators and gives them free-reign.

It’s November by the time he finally leaves the comfort and familiarity of the Lemieux home.

He shouldn’t be surprised by the accumulation of stuff that has filled the guest rooms over the years, and yet he finds himself griping internally  when the cardboard boxes and bubble-wrapped packages are plentiful enough that he has to make three trips with his car.

Sid is something of a collector, which isn’t a trait he wants to broadcast. He’s organized enough with his signed equipment, milestone pucks, commemorative photos, gifts, awards, and certificates, that most people aren’t even remotely aware of the sheer volume he hoards. Luckily the new house has storage, so Sid stows his memorabilia there, out of sight. He’ll get to organizing it later.

The decorators mostly went the route of modernity, although Sid has no clue what the specific style of design is called. It’s a lot of neutral-toned rectangular furniture and abstract line paintings and useless wire baskets on every flat surface. There’s natural light pouring from the tall windows, but the efficient LEDs make everything feel stark, like an art museum. He stands in his kitchen—blank white cabinetry and shiny chrome appliances—and it’s as if the house echoes around him.

It’s different from the lake house, which always exudes a sense of relaxation and solitude. He doesn't quite know why he feels unease. Maybe the ceilings are too high or the thermostat set too low.

He calls his mom.

“I don’t know what to make for dinner,” he says.  It’s a weak excuse.

“Didn’t your dad teach you how to cook?” She asks, her tone lightly teasing, and for a moment, all Sid wants is to be back in Nova Scotia on the shitty old couch, watching Hockey Night in Canada with his toes tucked between the cushions. He hasn't felt homesick in a long time.

“Yeah, he taught me,” Sid says. He tries to keep the pitch of whining out of his voice and mostly fails.

“Well what do you have in your fridge?”

Sid checks, and the shiny white shelves stare back at him. “Uh—”

“Start there, then.”

“Or I could just order something, I guess.” Although he’s not very confident yet on how his front gate works for deliveries. He could probably figure it out.

His mom hums. Sid imagines he can hear the water lapping the coast on the other end of the line. “It’s better to make a meal if you can. Something you enjoy. Ignore your nutritionist for the night.”

There’s no way he can manage his own chowder from scratch, but it’s definitely available in the soup aisle. He buys far too many groceries—all kinds of food that will probably spoil before he can eat it, and all kinds of dry goods from toilet paper to laundry detergent. The soup goes in a pot as soon as he gets home and the scent that wafts from beneath the lid helps to make the place seem a bit less lonely. He eats in awkward silence with himself, but it’s not so bad. He makes a mental note to call his mom after the next day’s game to tell her how smart she is, although he suspects she already knows.

He holds something resembling a housewarming party by early December when he has the smallest of breaks in his schedule. Not everyone he invites can attend, but he makes sure the younger guys from the team show up. Sometimes he worries he’s not doing all he can as a captain to make sure that they feel like they’re part of the team. Now that he has his own place, he reasons he can invite them over more often.

The party is hectic for Sid. He barely gets to talk to anyone for a decent amount of time. About halfway through the night when he runs out of energy for anything small-talk-oriented, he escapes when no one’s looking to the relative sanctuary of his laundry room. He splashed some red wine onto his shirt earlier, but it’s not until he searches through his cupboards that he realizes he doesn’t have any stain-remover for it.

So he relishes the peace of just standing there, leaning with his hands braced against the washer, his shirt untucked and unbuttoned as his guests’ buzzing conversation carries on around the corner. It feels like he’s avoiding being social at someone else’s house, not his own.

Geno comes around the corner of the long hallway. He’s wearing one of his damn soft-looking pastel cardigans again. “No bathroom?” He asks with a teasing smile.

“Down two doors,” Sid jerks his thumb in the right direction. Geno nods and goes.

Sid should go find a clean shirt upstairs.

He doesn’t.

Geno finds him again in a minute, wiping his palms on the thighs of his jeans even though Sid has perfectly good towels hanging up. He props his hip against the door frame and crosses his arms. Sid doesn’t know when Geno started to be able to fit so seamlessly in any environment. It’s something about the bemused twist of his lips and the way his limbs always arrange in a configuration of cocky comfort. By contrast, Sid usually just shoves his hands in his pockets and prays no one notices how he regrets being there.

“How’s house?” Geno asks.

And the thing is, Sid has been offering platitudes to everyone else who has asked so far, but he can’t lie to Geno. He’s made up a dozen nice things to say about the house that sound like he lifted them straight from house-hunter shows. None of them pass his lips now. “I fucking hate it.”

Geno barks a laugh. “Then why you buy?”

“I don’t know. I guess I felt—obligated,” Sid scowls at the linoleum floor for a second, now loathing its ugly off-white tile pattern. “The real estate agent kept _calling_ me to make a decision.”

“If you don’t like house, buy different house,” Geno suggests like it’s just so easy.

“But I spent _months_ renovating this one,” Sid whines.

“Good, then it’s sell for more money. Plus you live here for little bit, anyone want to buy. Sidney Crosby house is very rare.”

“Yeah but,” and now that he’s thinking about it, the whole process seems beyond exhausting, “It took me almost a year to find this place.”

Geno shrugs. “Get new house agent, tell you want place not like this one. You want something more like Mario’s house, yes?”

“Kinda,” Sid feels himself blush. He doesn’t want something quite so big and he’s not keen on pine cabinets or the heavy curtains on every window, but he misses having actual _rooms_ with individual purposes. Perhaps that’s why he’s hiding down the hallway with the laundry instead of enjoying the open concept of the rest of the house.

“And put _your_ things up in house. Painting by dining table? _Sucks_.”

Sid winces, “Yeah.”

“Looks like kid scribble,” Geno says.

“I know.”

“ _I’m_ do better painting.”

Sid doubts that. “Sure, of course,” he says kindly.

They talk shop for a bit, dissecting parts of the last few games that Geno has watched from the press box, and Geno mentions he thinks he’ll be ready to play for the New Jersey game on Friday.

“And you’re _sure_ it’s not your knee or anything?”

“No, Sid,” Geno grumbles. “Not trust me?”

“I trust you. It’s just we both have bad luck for injuries.”

“It’s _Penguins_ have bad luck,” Geno says. He’s got that look in his eye like he’s about to lecture Sid again on the plausibility of chaos theory as it relates to hockey, or something like it. It’s a vicious cycle of Geno saying that Sid can’t fix everything and nor are the circumstances of personal injury ever directly his fault, while Sid argues that the strict rules of his rituals are what keep things _consistent_ , and consistency avoids trouble. Whatever. Geno has his superstitions too. Sid knows he plays the blame-game with himself just as often as Sid does, if not more.

The muted party noises crest as something crashes to the floor, followed by prolonged group laughter, which does not bode well for the state of Sid’s expensive hardwood.

“I guess I should get back in there,” he sighs and heads for the door.

Geno smirks.  “Finish hiding?”

“Shut up,” Sid shoves Geno lightly. He doesn’t budge. “Oh, hey, before you leave, remind me to give your book back to you.”

“Book?”

“Yeah, the Russian one? You left it at Mario’s house back when—” Sid immediately regrets mentioning it. He hated the whole miserable time around his concussion, and he doesn’t want to bring it up in case Geno wants to discuss it. He presses forward, trying to ignore the way his heart still feels dark and twisted-up. “ _Anna Karenina_.”

“Is _Karenina_ ,” Geno corrects his pronunciation lightly. “Uh, no, is okay you keep.”

“Geno,” Sid huffs, “I can’t read Russian. What use do I have for it?”

“Maybe you learn,” Geno offers.

Sid laughs and Geno mutters something rude that Sid can’t translate apart from the profanity. “Okay, but seriously I have to go make sure nothing important is broken out there.” And graciously, Geno lets him pass.

* * *

  _come over_

Sid stares at the message on the screen as he pedals his legs on his home bike to cool down. It’s Boxing Day, and his parents had gone to the airport early that morning. Sid had been planning to hit the mall, since making business phone calls on a Canadian holiday is a moot point, but he could go over to Geno’s place. It’d be nice to have some company.

_I have to shower first_ , Sid texts back.

_ok)) bring turkey_

Geno texts him the address while Sid is washing himself of his workout sweat. Sid has been to Geno’s place before, but not for any length of time. He knows how proud Geno is of his manor amid the trees, of the ugly statues on the drive and the nearby pond. Sid rings the doorbell with leftover Christmas dinner in hand.

The door opens with Geno on the other side in sweatpants and a t-shirt filled with holes. “Hi,” Geno says, and immediately takes the container from Sid’s hands, “Come in, shoes off.”

Sid toes his shoes off in the entry because he isn’t a heathen.  Then he tosses his coat onto the bench by the door. “So what’s up?”

“Bored,” Geno says, “Hungry.” He gestures with the turkey and asks, “Why you not bring more?”

“That’s all I had left.” The rest he had eaten as a guilty midnight snack directly from his fridge while his parents slept, oblivious to his transgression. There’s still some pumpkin pie, but Sid isn’t sharing that. He follows Geno into the house and takes in the décor. “Uh, how’s the leg doing?”

“Okay,” Geno says, “Back soon, I think, and then no more injury until after Olympics.” Sid knocks on wood when Geno doesn’t.

Gennady is in the kitchen drinking tea. He smiles as Geno cracks open the Tupperware and starts loading the food onto a plate. “Hello, Sidney. I’m leaving soon.”

“Oh, you don’t have to,” Sid says. He doesn’t want to push Geno’s friends out of the house.

Gennady shrugs, and finishes his cup. “Have to work. Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas,” Sid replies automatically, and Gennady exits with a clapped hand to Geno’s shoulder and a few words of Russian.

Geno puts his plate into the microwave and turns around to face Sid. “We order Chinese?”

Sid narrows his eyes, “So there’s no leftovers for me?”

“No, you already have big Crosby meal. My turn now. Only fair.” And Sid figures he can steal from Geno’s plate later, so he lets it drop.

“Nice stickers,” Sid points his chin at the wood paneling and his cutout likeness.

Geno opens the panel and reveals what’s behind it. “Fridge.”

“Oh, cool,” Sid says, and tries to get a peek inside before Geno closes it again. There’s not much in there, but he thinks he sees a carton of eggs.

The microwave beeps. Geno opens the little door and sticks his finger in the mashed potato, clearly decides it’s not warm enough, and puts it back in for another minute. “So we watch movies, have more food. Good?”

“Sure,” and Sid is up for a lazy afternoon as long as it doesn’t get too late. They have a flight to Carolina in the morning. “Did you hear about Duper?”

Geno nods, frowning. “I’m call him yesterday, but it’s just answer machine.”

Sid sighs. Duper’s knee will almost definitely take the rest of the season to heal. It’s been a big lump of coal in the joy of the short holiday break. “We’ll go visit him in a few weeks when he’s more likely to want us around.”

They make their way to Geno’s media room, which is lined on one wall with video games and blu-rays. There’s an assortment of crappy Penguins-themed souvenirs on shelves next to the big-screen. Geno flops himself onto a plush leather armchair, and immediately starts digging into his food, stuffing his cheeks like he’s worried about theft. So maybe Sid is a little predictable when it comes to his eating habits.

“Choose movie,” Geno says with his mouth full, and Sid scans the collection of discs. There’s a cluster of Bond films, though nothing older than maybe the 90s. The one exception is _Octopussy_ , and Sid pulls it out, curious. And, wow. Of course.

“Really, Geno?” Sid asks. He holds up the suggestive porno cover, four sets of bare legs twisting around some guy in a rumpled tuxedo with a lusty smile.

Geno gives him a cheesy grin, “We can watch.”

“No, thanks.” Sid shoves the case back onto the shelf where he found it. He definitely doesn’t think about how Geno must have jerked off in this room, probably more than a few times.

Eventually he settles on _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ , and hands it to Geno so he can deal with all the expensive equipment. He takes the opportunity to steal a piece of turkey from Geno’s plate.

About a quarter of the way through the film, Geno falls asleep in his chair, the tryptophan knocking him out. Sid doesn’t _watch_ him breathing slowly, looking completely relaxed in his lounging clothes on his Penguins chair, but Sid does glance over a few times. Half an hour later, Geno snorts himself awake, sits up immediately, and says, “Chinese.”

He pauses the movie and stumbles drowsily out of the room. In a minute Sid can hear him nearby, rattling off his order into the phone. When he comes back, Sid asks, “Did you—”

“Chow mein, yes, I get extra,” Geno says, and Sid can’t possibly be imagining the look of fondness.

“Okay. How much do I owe you?”

“Thirty,” Geno returns to his seat and hits play again, “You pay me later.”

The food arrives just as the credits roll on Indiana Jones. Geno puts on _Jeopardy_ while they plow through the cartons. He yells the wrong answers at the screen enthusiastically. He doesn’t phrase anything as a question. Sid doesn’t know anything about the categories on this episode, and isn’t doing much better.

“Eiffel Tower!” Geno shouts, and Sid has no idea what the answer to this one is.

“What is larceny?” The contestant asks.

“Correct,” Trebek says.

Geno groans. “So close!”

“You’re not close at all,” Sid laughs.

“Closer than you,” Geno replies, which is technically true.

There’s three fortune cookies in the bag, and Geno wrestles him for the extra, only to toss it to him once he’s won the match by height over bulk. Sid eats both his cookies happily, and thinks about the pie waiting for him at home. He’s still on vacation time, which means he can allow himself to eat it without any lingering guilt. Then maybe he’ll go to bed early.

“Are you coming with us on the trip tomorrow?”

Geno hums, considering. “Hard choice. Stay here, maybe I get better and miss chance to play. Come with, I’m miss New Year, big parties, lots of Russian friends. Which is more important, I’m not know.”

Sid rolls his eyes. “You should come.”

“Yes, okay,” Geno smiles, “trainers say is fine to go with team.”

“Well alright then,” Sid pushes himself up to standing, bracing on his knees. “I should head out.”

Geno trails behind him with his hands in his pockets as Sid puts his coat and shoes back on.

“Thanks for having me over,” Sid says, opening the front door. “It was fun.”

“Do again sometime,” Geno smiles. He waves as Sid climbs into his car and drives off.

* * *

 The Canadian National Team holds a different kind of appeal for Sid than the Penguins do. He’s not sure if it’s the pride he feels for being the best of the best to captain his country to victory, or the fuzzy delight of being part of a group of guys who most other nights are viciously slamming him into the boards and now have become his temporary friends. As soon as they all meet up for their flight to Russia, the team folds him in among their ranks, chirping and throwing arms around his shoulders.

It’s kind of like summer camp.  If summer camp were in the middle of February and on the other side of the planet.

Of course, it’s different from Vancouver. The roster has changed and they’re in hostile territory—although Sid wouldn’t necessarily phrase it that way. Sochi is temperate and accommodating. Otherwise, Team Canada is only another jersey he wears. Hockey is still his passion.

They have about five days after they arrive to assemble into an effective team.  Everyone is at their peak conditioning in the middle of the NHL season, so a lot of their ice time is spent on testing line combinations and defensive pairings until Babcock and the other coaches see something they think will work. The team eats together, practices together, hangs out together, chirps together, and even sleeps down the same dormitory hallway together. By the time they’re prepping for their game against Norway, Sid has made his rounds and is pretty confident in his relationship with everyone on the team.

Norway scores on the power play mere seconds into the third, but Canada wins 3-1.

After the game, they hold a meeting in the lobby of the Canadian building. Everyone seems a bit sleepy, but otherwise in a good mood, zipped up to the chin in their tracksuits.

“A good win there, boys,” says Babcock, “But there’s still work to be done if we want to keep winning.” Sid opens his mouth to offer up any of the chances he saw fly by during the game. He’s got a list, but he’ll try to keep to the big ones. “Penalties!”

Sid snaps his mouth shut.

“They only scored because we gave them the upper hand. This is international hockey, not the messy shit you play back home, so clean it up.” Babcock runs a pen down the margin of his notepad, “Alright, tomorrow we’ll work on the PK. Call your ladies for Valentine’s tonight if doing it tomorrow will mess up your routine. And then get some rest. I want everyone perky for morning skate.”

The meeting disbands, some guys heading out for food and others to sleep. Sid walks next to Toews back to their shared room. It’s a good setup because as soon as the door closes behind them, Toews breaks into a scathing analysis of the game, and Sid feels content once they’ve broken it all down into bits and pieces.

Against Austria, they do even better. Sid gets an assist on the first goal of Carter’s hat trick, and they shut out their opponents with six points. There’s no game the next day so the team has dinner together with their wives and girlfriends after another brief post-game meeting. No one gets especially wild, but they all take a shot of overpriced vodka each. They make Carter shoot three, and then the single guys break off from the group to find other _entertainment_.

The Olympics are kind of a fuck-fest, which Sid is uncomfortably aware of. His policy in this scenario is absolute abstinence. He wakes himself up every morning with a cold shower and uses his frustration to fuel himself through practice. The other Canadians, however, have no such qualms with an abundance of sex. There’s one night earlier on where Sid bounces from room to room, trying to watch game tape on his laptop for more than half an hour at a time before he gets sexiled. He gives up after the third room, and ends up roaming the Village for a while trying to cool down like he wishes his teammates would.

They scramble for an overtime win against Finland and then eliminate Latvia in the quarterfinals. The team really starts to buzz, but no one says anything about it.

Team Russia gets bumped, and Sid is a little disappointed. He hoped to play against them at some point. He’s missed Geno and hasn’t seen his team around the Village at all. He puts it all out of his mind. If it were him, he knows he wouldn’t appreciate contact from someone who was advancing to the semifinals.

The game against the States is frustrating. Benn gets one goal and they cling to that lead for the duration. The U.S. puts up more shots than they’ve faced from any other team so far, but, finally, the buzzer sounds and it’s over.

They’re going to the gold medal game, and Sid knows in his heart that they’re ready for it. No one is thinking about the shiny prize. All they want is the win.

Sweden fights for it, but Price is impenetrable. It’s Toews, in the first. Sid gets his goal, finally, in the second. And then _Kuni_ wraps up it in the third.  It’s his only point of the tournament, but arguably one of the most important.

Sid is beaming, proud.

The party starts from the moment the game ends, straight through the anthems and the medal ceremony and the group pictures, and carries into the night. Someone gets champagne for the room and by the time it’s dark out and they head back to the Village, they’re soaked and sticky. Any number of other Canadian athletes join in on their festivities. Sid gets exceedingly drunk but he has _plans_ now that they’ve won. He heads back to his room when it looks like Toews will be well-occupied for a while.

He locks the bathroom door, sheds his layers, and gets in the shower with the heat on full blast. His muscles feel like they’re melting and his cock aches. He hasn’t touched himself with intent in two weeks, but he takes himself in hand now. It’s unlikely that he’ll last. It’s unlikely that he’ll be satisfied with just one orgasm.

Everything unwinds now that he has the gold medal. He’s done his job and led his country to victory, and now he’s bubbling over with need. It could be the champagne and the beer and the vodka, too. He isn’t cautious about his fantasies.

Sid pictures lowering himself into Geno’s lap in the wide-open living room of the new house, tall open windows spilling his secrets onto the streets, and sunshine and Geno surrounding him, keeping him warm. In his fantasy, he slips his tongue in Geno’s mouth and Geno can’t help but clutch him closer. Neither of them have anywhere to be. Sid feels safe and _wanted_. Geno moans greedily into his mouth, tucks his hand between them as they kiss to palm Sid’s dick, and then Sid comes against the shower wall.

He washes his hair while he recovers, mind drifting over Geno’s every shape. He thinks about how soft Geno looks all the damn time, like Sid could just curl up with him and never leave. Sid saw him a few weeks ago in what had to be a cashmere sweater. He pictures sliding his hands beneath it to feel the smooth skin of Geno’s stomach, his privately supple sides, his hips, his back. Geno’s always licking his bottom lip and Sid sometimes just wants to chase it with his own mouth, finally find out what Geno tastes like. And Geno has such great hands—strong and capable and long-fingered—and Sid wants them on him, inside him. God, it completely _wrecks_ Sid sometimes to remember what it felt like to be beneath Geno.

When he’s hard again, Sid turns the shower down to a trickle and lets the water run down his chest. His fantasy takes him back to the living room and there he pushes Geno down onto the couch, writhes on top of him until Geno is making desperate begging noises. Sid reaches into Geno’s pants and finds him hard and slick, just like he recalls from years ago.

He’s not sure whether he wants his mouth on it, or—

The fantasy shifts, tilts sideways, and it’s Geno’s tongue sliding over his hole, Sid face-down in the sheets. He misses this. Geno slides his hands up Sid’s thighs and holds Sid’s ass open for his mouth. He spirals his tongue and then presses _in_ , fucking inside, and Sid moans at that, voice echoing against the tile.

“You want me?” Geno asks in the fantasy. Sid gasps _yes_ and reaches back in the shower, finding himself tender and tight. Just the pressure against his asshole is enough friction. He wants it in him, feels the yawning space where he wants to be fucked, but there’s no give, so he holds his cock in his left hand and rocks his hips into the sensations of both.

“So good,” Fantasy Geno murmurs, and now he’s watching Sid in the shower, playing with himself and desperate for it. Desperate for Geno. “So good, Sid," he purrs. "Best.”

Sid’s fingertip wedges inside, he twists his wrist once, and then he comes, eyes squeezed shut and barely able to keep from shouting.

He luxuriates for a while, forehead pressed to the tiles, groaning a little as he slides his hand over his cock until he’s too sensitive and has to withdraw. When the satisfaction fades, he’s just tired. Victory orgasms are fantastic, but he doesn’t want to be alone right now. He’s relieved to be able to release himself yet he can’t help but feel disappointment. Then he feels a frisson of guilt for being disappointed about who he wants there with him. He’d jacked off to thoughts of Geno without a care for the personal consequences he’ll suffer the next time they’re in the same room together.

He cranks the shower taps all the way off, and then towels himself down for bed.

* * *

 “Hey Geno, are you busy tomorrow?” Sid asks after the game against Dallas. He’s let this go on for far too long.

Geno looks up at him, and there’s no smile twitching at the corners of his lips. His eyes are heavy-lidded. “Free after skate,” Geno says dully.

“Can I come over?”

“Okay,” Geno nods.

Sid finds himself the next day sitting in his car outside Geno’s house. His palms feel clammy. Sid can tell that Geno’s performance has been suffering since the Olympics. He thinks about how he would have felt if Canada hadn’t even medaled back in 2010, the pressure of a country that adores its sport and the perceived collective shame of millions hanging over his head, and he feels sick. Sid doesn’t want to have to be the one to poke at Geno’s vulnerability, but he will if it's helpful in the end. He can always beg the angle of captainly duty.

He just hopes Geno doesn’t throw anything at him.

Geno invites him inside, and they settle in Geno’s sitting room, opposite each other on floral-upholstered furniture that Sid quietly considers hideous.

The seconds tick by: an uncomfortable sort of silence during which Sid contemplates the sounds of Geno’s house. Sid steels himself and speaks. “We didn’t talk much after the Olympics. I was wondering how you were doing,” he swallows past the dryness, “As your captain, but also as your friend.”

“You think I play like shit,” Geno accuses, and Sid sort of shrugs. He knows it’s temporary, but it’s the truth.

They lapse into silence again. This time, it’s not as awful for Sid, knowing he’s said his piece and he can wait for Geno to organize his feelings.

When Geno does speak again, Sid expects ragged edges, but the voice that comes out of Geno is small and hurt. “I ruin everything, Sid.”

Sid bites the inside of his cheek to keep from commenting. Geno just needs to vent and he’ll feel better, and _then_ Sid can offer him encouragement. To say it now would be to belittle Geno’s feelings.

“When I’m hear that winter Olympics gonna be in Russia, I’m hope I’m still playing good enough for them to pick me for team. I want to play best for home country. I want to make them proud. It’s like—” He breaks off, and drags a hand down his face, “I don’t explain it right.”

Sid waits, and then Geno starts up again.

“In Russia, people who do good things for country is _hero_. And I want to be hero. I want to show little kids if they work hard, they can be hero too. I want to show I’m hero to Magnitogorsk and my family and my friends that I can do my best and show whole world how good Russia is. Most, I want to be hero for me.” Geno swipes at his eyes, sniffs hard. He’s speech is warbled and wet. “But I _can’t_ . I don’t know, I try so hard, but is not enough. I give everything for team— _everything_ , Sid, you don’t know how much. And then we play at home and everyone watching and we get nothing. I’m get nothing.”

His English vanishes and he speaks in Russian while he cries, tears slipping from his red-rimmed eyes as Sid listens to the darkness and self-doubt pouring from him. The bottoms of Geno’s sleeves end up damp from trying in vain to contain his breakdown.

“If I’m can’t play good for Russia, but now I play good for Penguins, I’m traitor to country,” Geno eventually continues in words Sid can understand, “If I play bad for both, I’m shitty hockey player. Nothing I can do. Every time I go to play, this is what I think, and is so hard for me.” He seems to run out of steam then, though Sid pauses to make sure it’s his turn to speak.

“Did anyone tell you that you disappointed your country?”

Geno picks at the seam of his jeans. “No, not this time,” he says roughly, “Just say, ‘Sorry, Zhenya, so sorry.’ But guys on team—I can tell, they mad about it.”

“I think they were probably more upset with themselves,” Sid says. Not that Sid hasn’t been angry at teammates’ performances in the past, but he doubts that’s the case here.

“Maybe,” Geno mutters.

“It was just the way the tournament was set up. It was just the one loss.” Sid thinks maybe that’s why it stings so much for Geno. It could’ve been the same scenario for any team, whether they had home-ice advantage or not. “If the Penguins lose a game, we just say we have to move on and get better for the next game, right? That’s what you’ve got to do for this.” Barring any disasters or more ridiculousness from the League, Sid and Geno will play in the Olympics again. That’s four years in the future, though, and Sid needs Geno to be at his peak for the Penguins long before then. "You're the best guy on my team, you know? Best ever."

Geno takes in his words, and nods slowly.

“Can I come sit next to you now?” Sid asks. It’s been hell to sit across from Geno while he suffered through his breakdown alone.

“Yes, okay,” Geno sniffles, and Sid is up and next to Geno in the space of a breath.

He pulls Geno’s body into his as best he can, putting his arm around Geno and letting him slump until his head is pillowed on Sid’s shoulder. Sid lets Geno paw the tears and snot off his own face, although he’s tempted to take care of it himself. Geno’s cheek is hot even through his sweatshirt. Within a moment or two, Geno is settled and comfortable. His breathing slowly returns from gasping into something more even and measured.

Sid isn’t sure how long Geno is curled against him before he gives into temptation and cards a hand through Geno’s hair. It’s as soft as he suspected.

They sit there for a long time, and Sid doesn’t even run plays on the ice rink of his mind. He just enjoys the weight of Geno leaning on him and how simple it is to just _be_. Sid is glad he could be there for Geno. He hopes it’ll help. He wants Geno’s hockey to improve because now that he’s not worried about national obligations, he needs the Cup again, but he also can’t bear to watch Geno drown as he struggles with himself. The Geno he’s always known and cared about is delighted by the game, not burdened by it, and Sid never wants the smile to fade from his face.

Eventually, as the sun starts to settle lower in the sky and filter in apricot hues through the hazy clouds, Geno’s stomach growls, and Sid chuckles. “You hungry? Should we order pizza?”

“Want McDonald’s,” Geno grumbles. His voice is still scratchy. “Big Mac and milkshake. Supersize fries.”

“We can take my car.” Sid can probably stop sounding all cautious and gentle. Any second now.

Geno maneuvers into a more upright position. He looks at Sid.

And looks.

“What, something on my face?” Sid scrubs the side of his face, sleeve catching on the stubble. He should probably shave before the flight to Detroit in the morning. “Geno? What is it?”

“Nothing,” Geno says, but still he stares, mouth softly open. “Just,” he trails off and after a moment he physically shakes himself. “Sorry. Sorry, just tired, need food.”

“Okay,” Sid says slowly, “Let’s go then.”

Geno doesn’t say anything on the trip to the drive-thru. He watches the road pass by out the window until it’s time to order, and he recites his request again, as if it hasn’t been the same thing for years. He falls silent again as they eat their meals parked in a mostly empty CVS parking lot. Sid lets him think. An outpouring of emotions can take a lot out of a guy.

“Hey Sid?” Geno finally says, and Sid is fortunate he doesn’t get whiplash from how fast he turns his head.

“Yeah?”

And as the Spring evening droops into nighttime, Geno only smiles and says, “Thanks for listen me.”

“Oh,” Sid goes pink, but it’s dark in the car. “You’re welcome.”

"But don't tell Flower you think I'm best. He get jealous and you never win shootout practice ever again."

  



	9. the cliff

“ _Don’t read that_ ,” Flower lectures sharply in French, and slaps the papers from Sid’s hand. Sid has no choice but to let it fall between his feet because his stupid wrist leaves him with no gripping strength. It’s all taped-up for the flight out of town, discreetly tucked under his sleeves and more clandestine than a brace for any wandering camera lenses. “ _There’s no time for self-doubt._ ”

Sid knows that, but once he gets started reading, he can’t stop until he knows the opinions of every hockey journalist across the continent. It wasn’t his fault. He was reading about another team in the checkout line when he’d seen his annual headshot staring out at him from the page, and before he knew it, he’d purchased all the sports magazines that the gas station had to offer. He’d even abandoned his Mars bar in his distraction. It was the very reason he didn’t have subscriptions to anything remotely hockey-related.

He goes to reach for his copy of _Illustrated_ , but Flower kicks it away, and it skitters beneath the seat. “Seriously?” Sid gripes.

But Flower just gives him a sad look, almost pitying. “You know you’re our guy.”

Sid huffs, and goes to cross his arms before the twinge makes him remember his _fucking_ wrist again. He settles for balling his other fist—letting his nails dig into the palm—and grinds his back molars together, feeling the ugly click in his jaw when he does. “Yeah, I know.” He hopes the _fuck off and leave me alone_  is implicit in his tone.

“I’m only trying to help. If it was me reading all this bullshit—“

“You _do_  read it,” Sid says. Flower is one of the worst of them when it comes to investing time in the hockey gossip columns.

“Well you’re better than what those articles say,” Flower insists. “You’re just in a little playoff rut. It just means you’re human. Your value isn’t just in your goal-scoring.”

Sid slams his head back into the airplane seat.

Flower throws his hands up and swears in French. “ _I can’t deal with you when you’re like this._ ” He unbuckles his seatbelt and turns around to look pleadingly at the next row.

“Nope,” says Kuni, “I did it last time.”

Every little noise is overwhelming and irritating to Sid: Flower and Kuni’s harsh, accusatory whispers, the muffled roar of the plane engines, the whirring air nozzles overhead. Sid has a tension headache that feels like it’s forming right between his eyes. Plane rides don’t normally bother him, but he just wants to be off the damn thing already. He’ll jump if he has to.

“Okay, okay, is my turn,” Geno says, coming from further down the aisle, and Sid looks up at him. He has his blue shirt unbuttoned to his chest, pendants glittering enticingly in the valley of cotton-blend.

“Great,” Flower grumbles, and climbs over Sid’s legs to escape.

Geno settles into the window seat next to Sid. He doesn’t say anything. Sid stares at him as Geno buckles his belt, waiting for well-meaning chastisement that doesn’t come. Instead, Geno gathers Sid’s clenched fist in his hand, and waits for Sid to relax. When Sid does, more curious than cowed, Geno flips his palm and smooths his thumb over the crimson crescents Sid’s nails have left behind. Sid is fascinated by it, the way Geno can manage to soothe his hurt, leaving trails of tingling like tiny stars in his wake.

Sid sucks in a breath and manages not to ask Geno to keep going.

Then, carefully, Geno threads his fingers through the gaps between Sid’s, and they’re holding hands. With the warmth, and tripping of Sid’s heart, his misery vanishes like smoke.

Sid sighs again and closes his eyes. He doesn’t sleep, but focuses on the moment rather than his frustration.  He survives the rest of the flight.

“Come for dinner,” Geno says to him as they all linger on the tarmac, waiting for a bus caught in midday traffic. It’s cloudy and cool, but unlikely to rain. Geno has let go of his hand, his arms now full of his jacket and carry-on bag. Sid’s wrist is tucked away safely.

“We have a game tonight,” Sid says. He isn’t especially looking forward to it, although they’d managed a shutout the previous night.

“Tomorrow, then. Day off.”

Sid watches the wispy white clouds so he doesn’t have to look at Geno. He’s embarrassed at his attitude, but he can’t seem to help it. “I’m not really fit for team dinners right now.”

“No team, just you and me,” and Sid does glance over for a moment to see a softness around Geno’s eyes that Sid doesn’t think he deserves. “Just us, okay?”

They end up winning again. Sid finally scores, it’s another shutout for Flower, and the guys seem hopeful about their chances. They’re up two to one, and they just need two more wins to clinch the series. Totally doable. Sid lets the enthusiasm of his teammates buoy him along until he can pass out in his hotel bed. His last thought before he sleeps is to wonder who they’ll face in the third round and if his body can hold up to it.

Practice is light the next day, but it’s still hell. Sid’s legs are working just fine—it’s his shot that makes him cut his blades deeper into the ice in frustration. He’s out there long after everyone else has retired to the locker room, trying to make his lungs burn, make his shoulders ache— _something_ to feel as if he’s put in the work for the day, because the puck is just not finding the back of the empty net.

“Fuck _me!_ ” He shouts as another shot bounces uselessly away from the goal. He smacks his stick against the ice, but it’s not enough to snap it in half the way he wants.

“Sid, come on, everyone leave,” Geno calls lightly from the benches. Sid swivels to face him, and Geno is already in his street clothes, expression carefully composed instead of the teasing twist that Sid expects. For a brief, heated second, Sid wants to grab Geno by the lapels and just knock him _down_.  He would be the perfect resistance for Sid to volley his anger against.

The feeling passes, though, and the fight drains out of him as he skates over. “Did the bus already leave?”

“Yes. I’m stay and wait for you, though,” says Geno. Some of his customary humor returns. “You stink. Go shower, then we take cab.”

Geno sits in his temporary visitor’s stall and fiddles with his phone while Sid undresses and cleans up. The exhaustion is settling into his limbs now, but he’s unsatisfied by his workout. His wrist twinges as he lathers his hair and he’ll probably have to ice it for the rest of the day. By the time he’s dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, Sid is no less cranky than before, although he certainly feels much cleaner. He could use a nap for maybe a thousand years.

“Where we go for dinner?” Geno asks as they walk towards the street. The team has the rest of the day off as a reward for their recent victory.

Sid shrugs. He still doesn’t want to go out.

“Big, nice place?” Geno muses, regarding Sid out the corner of his eye as he holds the door open, mindful of Sid’s wrist. “Or you want shitty, tiny pizza place?”

He’s not sure when Geno caught onto Sid’s pizza-comfort habit, but he’s not surprised. However, the prospect of a New York pizza parlor right now makes Sid’s stomach lurch with guilt. “Neither,” Sid says. It comes out more bitter than he’d anticipated.

“Okay, you want big salad instead?”

“I don’t care. Whatever you want is fine.” Sid wishes he’d come up with a good excuse to skip the inevitable heart-to-heart. At the very least, he can leave the decision-making about menu options to Geno.

Geno hums. “Don’t trust New York borscht, but okay. We got back to your room, and I’m order most expensive sushi delivery instead.” Sid is wearing his baseball cap low over his eyes, so Geno is the one to flag down a taxi.

They separate when they get to the hotel. Sid changes out of his jeans and into sweatpants to ensure there’s no way Geno will drag him out to eat. When Geno knocks on his door in half an hour, he’s similarly dressed, looking cozy in his team-branded hoodie. Sid could probably snuggle right into the soft dark fabric of it.  He only barely resists.

Geno stretches out on the covers of Sid’s bed with his phone, probably researching sushi delivery while Sid flips through the channels on the TV. “No _Friends_ , Sid,” Geno warns when Sid hesitates on Ross getting chirped about his divorces in the Central Perk Café.

“But _Friends_ is all that’s on,” Sid grumbles. It’s good, reliable, funny television, but he complies and keeps surfing.

He ends up with _American Ninja Warrior_ , which Geno doesn’t voice any particular opinion about, so he watches absurd displays of fitness and wonders if there’s any of it that he can add to his training repertoire.

“Come here,” Geno complains after a while, patting the empty space on the bed. Sid knees up the bed until he’s sitting next to Geno, and then leans into the pillows. “Where’s ice?”

Sid flops his good hand towards the mini fridge where he’d left a few ice packs the trainers had burdened him with the night before. Geno grumbles when Sid doesn’t move, but amazingly, he gets up to fetch one of the packs and a face cloth from the bathroom. He hands them over and then resumes his recline. It’s possible he’s sitting even closer than he was before, but Sid is probably just imagining that. He arranges his wrist loosely over his stomach, and it isn’t long before he falls asleep.

He wakes up to Geno nudging him. He isn’t resting his head on Geno’s shoulder, but it’s a near thing, his body curled towards that side of the bed.

“What you want for sushi?”

“Uh,” Sid says, trying to untwist himself from where he’s trapped his good arm under his side. The resulting staticky sensation goes from his bicep to the tips of his fingers and he shakes himself to try to dispel the feeling of a limb asleep. “I’m not the expert. You pick.”

Geno rolls his eyes. “Okay, so you want eels, squids, little yellow squishy ones—what’s it call?” He taps on his phone.

“What? Geno, no,” Sid whines. “Come on, nothing weird.”

“Too late,” Geno says, tapping away. When he’s satisfied, ignoring Sid’s protests, he puts his phone into his hoodie pocket and then rolls over on top of Sid. He uses his height to try and pin Sid down, but Sid squirms out from under him before things can get out of hand.

“Unbelievable,” Sid gripes. He goes to trade his ice pack for a colder one. The TV is playing the local news now.

Geno sprawls on the bed, “Food gets here in half hour.”

“Uh huh,” Sid says, and tosses his ice down so he can go take a piss. In all their years knowing each other, Sid hasn’t fallen asleep next to Geno often. His temples are dewy, and his heart is thumping unevenly, but it feels overwhelmingly _right_. He wants to crawl back under Geno’s body because he knows it will quiet his mind.

When Sid comes out of the bathroom, Geno is sitting up at the end of the bed. He’s been running his hands through his hair, and it’s a fluffy mess. Sid presses his lips together and fiddles with his wrist. Geno watches him with something akin to apprehension. Or maybe it’s exasperation. Everyone else around him has been expressing some blend of the two for weeks.  It’s like no one knows how to act around him anymore.

“Sid—“

“I know.”

Geno sighs and shifts, persisting even though Sid cutting him off. “What media is say about you—it’s stupid. They don’t know how hard you work, how much you try.”

“It’s not just me,” Sid admits. “It’s the whole team. I don’t want to let them down.”

“You not,” Geno says, reaching out for Sid. He lets himself be pulled closer, and Geno has a determined set to his eyes. “Every guy here thinks you’re best. We all want win together. And if we lose, we lose together.”

Sid sits down and stares at the beige-green carpet between his bare feet. “Yeah. I guess.”

“You’re best hockey player, okay? No one better than you. All those reporters don’t know, but I do. You’re hurt right now—so what? You still try hard even when it’s painful.” Geno bumps him with his elbow companionably. “Hey, back when I’m sad after Olympics, some smart guy tell me to forget about how bad yesterday is and just try again next day. He say don’t worry about what people think because they’re all assholes who don’t understand anyway. Fuck everyone else.”

“I don’t think that’s what I said,” Sid smiles a little.

“I’m not say _you_ tell me, Sid. I say was some smart guy. You think that’s you?”

Sid grins at Geno. “Smarter than you, yeah.”

Geno laughs lightly. “So tomorrow we play next game. You try again. And Sid,” Geno cups Sid’s face in his hands and Sid stops breathing as Geno leans closer. Sid’s eyelashes flutter, but Geno stops an inch away, his gaze sharp with honesty. “You never let me down, ever.”

He can’t speak until Geno pulls away, and then all he can say is, “Alright.”

Geno nods like that’s the end of it, and Sid supposes it is. He changes the channel to something with minimal dialogue as a concession to Geno. Sid isn’t a big fan of _Wipeout_ , but it’ll suffice to turn off his brain and watch people fail to navigate unfair obstacle courses and fall backwards into the mud.

By the time the episode is ending, there’s a knock at the door. Geno stands to answer it, and Sid can hear the conversation.

“Pittsburgh Penguins, hockey team, right?” Asks the delivery guy, probably reading Geno's hoodie. “That’s cool. When does hockey start up again?”

“Game tomorrow night,” says Geno. “Is playoffs.”

“Oh, so are you in town for the game?”

“Yes.” Sid snorts a little at that, but talking to people who know absolutely nothing about hockey can be refreshing in its own way.

There’s a rustling of bags being handed over. “Well have fun, man.”

“Thanks,” Geno says, and Sid hears a short round of goodbyes before the door clicks closed.

Geno rounds the short corner back into the room and hands one of the bags to Sid. He unties it with some trepidation, but whatever it is smells pretty good. All of the sudden, he realizes that he’s _starving._

And then inside his container, to his surprise: “It’s a steak.”

“Of course,” Geno smiles at him as he spreads his own containers out over the bed. “You think I’m not know what you like?”

The steak is pre-cut into manageable slices and drizzled with a dark sauce, accompanied by mushrooms and a handful of edamame. “That’s fair,” Sid says, and he shouldn’t have actually been worried about Geno ordering him something that wasn’t to his tastes.

Geno hands Sid another one of the containers, which is filled with ravioli pasta. “Lobster,” Geno explains. He opens his own meal, and it’s the fancy-looking sushi Sid was expecting. There’s salmon and tuna, but also an assortment of mystery rolls, and what appears to be caviar—which Geno dives for first.

Sid’s steak dinner is really good, seared on the outside and tender in the middle, seasoned with a peppery kick. The mushrooms are chewy and sweet, which he hadn’t been expecting, but the richness pairs well with the meat. The lobster pasta is the kind of comfort food he didn’t know he needed. It’s a luxurious take on surf-and-turf, and Sid is amazed that it all came from the same place as Geno’s strange collection of sushi.

“This one is gold,” Geno says, inspecting a piece and then holding it out to Sid between his thumb and forefinger. “Nealer say gold food is make your shit sparkle. You try?”

“No, thanks,” Sid says dryly, although he’s definitely curious. Geno shrugs and pops it in his mouth, savoring until he pronounces it good.

He holds out a different selection, “Here, you like. All veggies.” Sid goes to take it from Geno, but Geno is too quick and pushes it into Sid’s mouth instead, the tips of his fingers brushing the inside of Sid’s lips.

“You don’t have to hand-feed me,” Sid grumbles around his mouthful, if only distract from the pounding of his heart. “I think I can handle it.”

“Don’t know,” Geno shrugs and _winks_ , “Sometimes you need someone take care of you.”

Sid rolls his eyes and takes the next piece on his own. He turns his face away to hide his reddening cheeks.

Part of the reason Sid struggles with sushi is that it can be a lot to manage in one bite, but this is a good contrast to the heavy carbs and protein of his meal. He chews and swallows, and then steals Geno’s avocado roll when he isn’t looking. By the time he’s finished eating and Geno is putting the last slice of sashimi into his mouth, Sid is completely sated, and something in him relaxes. He wants to sleep for a long time and take Geno with him.

“No dessert?” Sid asks. He’s full, but he still wants something sweet.

Geno treats him to a look that is nothing but heat—something Sid hasn’t seen in a long time.  It drops him from contentment straight into yearning. “What you need?” His voice is low, suggestive.

Sid swallows. “Crème brûlée?” He guesses. Considering it was Geno who ordered, it’s more than likely.

Geno hums, but then produces one last container from the bags. He opens it to reveal a slice of cheesecake. It’s creamy white with a dollop of whipped cream on the side, and a swirl of red berry syrup on top. Sid licks his lips.

It’s also big enough to share.

“I can’t eat all that right now,” he admits, though he certainly wants to.

“So don’t,” Geno says. “Save for later. Pick movie to watch, I clean up. Don’t move wrist.”

Sid goes back to surfing the channels, and settles on some sort of action-comedy already in progress. Geno finishes disposing of the garbage from dinner, hands Sid another ice pack, and returns to lying on the bed. He pats the space next to him and Sid concedes. This time, Geno puts an arm around his back. Sid stiffens despite himself.

“Is okay,” Geno tugs him a little closer, “Relax.”

He isn’t sure how he can possibly calm down enough to relax, but somehow he does it. He doesn’t sleep this time, only finds himself dozing as the movie continues. He’s not really paying attention. The rise and fall of Geno’s chest beside him is far more interesting. If he concentrates, he can hear all the little automatic movements that Geno’s body makes as he digests. It should be gross, but Sid finds it fascinating.

By the time the movie ends, Sid is ready for his cheesecake. There’s no fork—Geno must have accidentally thrown it in the trash—so Sid pinches off pieces with his fingers and in general makes a mess. Geno does the same and makes exaggerated noises of pleasure as he eats until Sid is giggling. They can’t finish the slice, but that’s alright. Sid's fingers are tacky no matter how many times he licks them.

“You feel better now?” Geno asks as he’s leaving, and Sid feels his face fall as he remembers everything again. “Sorry, sorry, had to ask.”

“No, it’s fine. I had a nice night.” And he really did. He knows the warmth of Geno’s presence will carry him through at least until morning. “We’ll get to the next game, and it’ll be fine. Just one win after the other, eh?”

Geno nods, and reaches out to grip the back of Sid’s neck, squeezes his nape gently.

They win the next game, but then their luck runs out.

That’s the end of the post-season.

Most of the team has already left the locker room at the end of game seven, but Geno is still sitting in his stall, stripped down to his base layers. He hasn’t moved since Dan and the rest of the coaching staff gave their speech about pride and hard work. Sid has showered, but he wants to be the last one to leave.

Losing in the playoffs is hard, and it’s different every time. Sid doesn’t like the feeling at all—he loathes it—but he’s grown used to the stinging disappointment enough that he can handle his teammates before he allows himself to become a wreck.

He kneels in front of Geno. “Hey,” he murmurs, “G, are you—“ And he knows Geno isn’t _okay_ , so he rephrases. “Can I do anything to make it better?”

Geno looks to him, and Sid expects tears, but there are none. “Sid,” he says, voice scratchy like he’s been crying, though his face is merely drawn and pale. “We couldn’t do it for you.”

“Oh, Geno, no,” Sid says, and he has to form the words around his own lump of remorse, “We did our best. It’s not over yet. We’ll try again next game, right?”

“Let you down,” Geno mumbles.

Sid puts his hand on Geno’s, clasped between his knees, and echoes the sentiments from last week: “You can’t. You can’t let me down.”

“Sorry,” Geno whispers, and then he starts to tear up.

“Geno,” Sid hugs him. He lets Geno tuck his face into Sid’s shoulder and shudder with silent sobs. “It’s okay. This isn’t the end, I promise. We're not giving up.”

* * *

 Alice is Sid’s new real estate agent, and she’s already an improvement from the last one. Instead of asking Sid for his impossible list of needs and wants, she visits him at his house and has him guide her through what he dislikes about it, what features of the house he uses and which he neglects. She makes notes on her tablet and is firm and clear with her assessments.

“I’ll start looking for properties for you,” she says as she stashes her materials and paperwork in her enormous purse. “When are you free? I want to make sure we see a few places before you leave for the summer.”

“Well, I’ve got my surgery on Monday.” He’s dreading it, but now that he’s not on a constant stream of playoff adrenaline and painkillers, his wrist <i>aches</i> and remains mostly useless in its brace.

“Uh huh, and how long do you need to recover from that?”

Sid thinks about it. He doesn’t really need his wrist to look at houses. “I could probably be ready by Thursday.”

“Let’s say we’ll meet at one on Thursday, then. I can pick you up here,” Alice types the meeting date into her phone. “Just call me or text if you need more time.” Then she bustles out of the house as efficiently as she arrived.  Sid is left blessedly and completely alone.

He has to take an extra day to attend an informal meeting with the Penguins’ front office, but on Friday Alice zips them around in her Audi to criticize and compliment the nice, available houses in Sewickley.

“I dunno, it’s too…” Sid trails off, lost in the obscure language of describing domestic living spaces.

“The pillars aren’t your style, I know,” Alice says, and she’s right, but Sid never told her that and he’s amazed that she can glean that from—his personality, he supposes. “But you can always knock them out. What do you think of the living room space?”

“Spacious,” Sid hedges, and Alice nods, making a note of something.

“Do you think you’ll need just one social space, or multiple?”

“My friend has a media room. I’d like something like that for watching tape, and stuff,” Sid says.

Alice makes a noise of something like intrigue. “Okay, so we’ll say a smaller living room, and at least one entertainment space.”

“Uh, I don’t _need_ to—“ Sid starts in alarm, because this is the first certainty Alice has mentioned about his future house.

“Not a necessity, of course,” Alice says, before Sid can really start to really fret. “A house is more than the sum of its parts, but it’s good to have a few bonuses in mind.”

They look at five places that day and Sid finds reasons to dislike each of them. He can see himself visiting any of them, and maybe staying overnight at a couple, but he couldn’t bear to live in them. He’d rather keep the sterile, lonely one he has now.

“I’m pretty bad at this,” Sid admits as Alice drives him back home. It doesn’t feel too embarrassing to mention, though he never likes to be incompetent.

“Most single guys at nearly-twenty-seven aren’t looking for a multi-bedroom manor with a gated driveway,” Alice offers kindly. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Besides, you’ve already bought a house before, so you’re already ten steps ahead of a lot of people your age.”

Sid supposes she’s right. He’s been trying to watch a lot of home improvement shows to get a better idea of what he’s looking for. He rarely likes anything on _House Hunters_ , but at least it helps him to learn the lingo.

“Tell you what,” Alice says. “You go on your summer break, and when you go over to someone’s place for dinner, pick out one thing you want from their house. It can be anything; appliances, colours, landscaping, room layout, whatever. And, in the meantime, I won’t call you unless I find something I think you’ll like that we have to put an offer on immediately. Sounds good?”

“Yeah,” Sid agrees, and it’s a lot less pressure if he isn’t going to have Alice emailing him every other day about every nice-ish home for sale in and around Pittsburgh.

Sid does some rehab in town before transferring to a physio in Halifax and going back to Canada. He gets wind of the coaching upheaval while he’s waiting for his bags in customs, and he shoves all thoughts of it to the side. Mario had warned him about some changes to the team over the break, assuring him that there was nothing to worry about. His goal for the summer is only to heal and improve his own game. Let the team be fixed without his input.

He drops his stuff off at his lake house, checks that the taps and switches are all working, and then he drives to his parents’ place for dinner.

* * *

Geno is a little different when everyone arrives back in Pittsburgh for training camp. He had been mostly quiet over the summer, sending pictures over text, and otherwise making only one near-accusatory Skype call in late June.

“You know?” Geno had asked, mouth tight at the corners, “About Nealer?”

“No, Geno, of course not,” was Sid’s reply, and he had thought that Geno would get the same memo about restructuring, but maybe he hadn’t applied it to his own linemates. He had sounded hurt and confused while they talked.

At camp, though, Geno buzzes about. He makes the time to greet everyone, just like Sid does at the beginning of each year, though he’s less thorough about welcoming and more keen on his own weird brand of chirping. The guys seem to like it, though, and Sid appreciates that there are multiple ways to hold a team together, to build a group that can make it work until there’s a cup to lift. What's more striking is how _confident_ Geno seems with the leadership this year, like he's got something to prove to himself.

Duper is back with the kind of vengeance that Sid is certain only the French Canadians can achieve, pushing himself to work harder and applying himself with vicious fervor, even though he’s no-contact. Tanger and Flower and Kuni seem healthy, ready to go, and like with every new season, Sid is hopeful. He has the power in his shot back. As far as Sid is concerned, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.

Sid is willing to give the new coaching staff his best leadership and his best hockey. It’s a new system, to be certain, but Sid is a professional, and he can make it work.

He’s not sure when things start going downhill.

In mid-October with the season still in its infancy, Duper gets hit with a crosscheck and an errant puck, and he stays down for a what seems like an eon before being stretchered off the ice. Sid doesn’t know what to do with himself while it happens—mostly just stares in horror and tries to refocus afterwards—but Duper is back and chipper and raring to go in a handful of days.

Then, near the end of the month, Olli announces to the team after practice that he has thyroid cancer. Cautiously shy, soft-spoken, youthful Olli, so calm as he lays out his plans for treatment. There’s nothing anyone can say, but they all try anyways, and Olli bears all their words of encouragement and manful, mournful discontent with the situation. Sid sends him a care package of every jello flavour he can find when he’s released from the hospital, and Olli texts him that he’ll likely kill someone if he has to see another bowl of bright-coloured food-goo in his life.

Just as Olli is back on the ice, Duper tells the team he’s been getting blood clots.  He’ll be out of commission for the rest of the season and <i>fuck</i>.

Sid thinks back to the beginning of the road trip. He hadn’t noticed a thing. He hadn’t noticed any issues _at all_. Duper had been having a phenomenal few games. He seemed healthy, despite the game against Dallas and the handful of practices that he left early.

On top of everything, the league starts passing around the mumps virus, and Sid catches it.

It’s horrendous. Sid hates injuries to himself and to his teammates because there’s little he can do to fix it, but these health problems—insidious illnesses like Tanger’s stroke, Olli’s cancer, Duper’s clots—he’s completely helpless. They’re not just the guys he plays phenomenal hockey with, he realizes. They’re his friends. His family.

Geno is there next to him, just as broken open by it. Neither of them are playing particularly well, Sid more-so, but Geno always defends him, always looks out for him, tells anyone who will listen that Sid is the best there is. Geno finds Sid hiding out in one of the spare equipment rooms trying to catch a breath after a three-nothing loss to the Caps a few days after Christmas. He closes the door behind himself and comes to Sid’s side.

“Don’t you have some sort of Russian bonding thing tonight?” Sid sniffles, brushing his cuffs against his eyes to make sure he’s not crying openly. It’s only been a week since his last goal and half of that was the holiday break, but it feels like just a technicality. Really, it’s been a month of scoring drought.

“You think I want go out with Sasha when he’s get shutout?” Geno asks, incredulous. “Fuck no. He’s always mean when he win like that.” He strokes the back of his fingers over Sid’s cheek and they come away damp. Shit.

“I’m okay,” Sid says, pretending he's strong instead of feigning ignorance.

Geno doesn’t look like he believes it, but he lets Sid get away with the lie. He cards his fingers through Sid’s hair a few times and Sid is helpless but to turn his whole body towards Geno’s, chasing the movement.

And that’s the other thing—Geno keeps _touching_ him, more than before. At least, he thinks there’s more touching. They’re chaste things, like trailing fingers over Sid’s arm, or heavy, exhausted leaning when they’re standing near to each other, or gripping Sid’s shoulders and shaking him when he’s chirping, but all those touches rile Sid like nothing else. When Sid is having a rare good day, Geno just lifts him higher with all these compliments that Sid doesn’t really understand because they’re not about hockey. They don’t sound like chirps.

“Always look so comfy, Sid,” Geno says to him as they file in for video review one day. Sid looks down at his outfit—the same as everyone else, pretty much, just leggings and a sweatshirt.

“So sweet with Duper and Kuni kids,” he says on a family skate day, turning a teasing circle around Sid on the ice, but with a soft, genuine smile.

“Blue is good colour for you,” Geno brushes appreciatively over the lapel of Sid’s game day suit, “My favourite, but it’s nicest for you.”

Sid finds himself blushing the more specific the compliments become. Geno tells him in February that he has long eyelashes, and in March it’s a comment about Sid’s lips which he has heard at least a _million_ times before from multiple sources, but it has Sid rubbing his mouth all week long, wondering.

Hockey is hard, and his production is starting to beat him down, but Geno does his best to build Sid up.

And then, sometimes, Sid will look at Geno, will stare back and let himself _feel_ openly the way he rarely does. Sid runs his eyes over the long, bold lines of him, white silk over steel, all pink cheeks and red temper and golden heart. He watches the way Geno tugs on his earlobe when he’s nervous, the way he shifts his stance to threatening in the faceoff circle, the way he licks his lower lip and smiles bashfully before he jokes with reporters. And Sid is once again struck, and all he wants is to cross the room and kiss Geno, and never let go. It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine.

* * *

 Sid gets a call from Alice in late January. They’ve been looking at a few places, and Alice shows exemplary patience with Sid’s indecision and pickiness. She respects his schedule completely, so when Sid sees her name on his call display, he knows it’s for a specific house. “It’s just down a bit from Mario Lemieux’s place—don’t ask me how I know that—but it went up for sale yesterday and I really think you’ll like it.”

It’s not a perfect place and there’s lots about it Sid isn’t keen on, but it can be renovated. He loves the location, and the land, and the space, and Alice insists that’s what matters. He buys it, gifts Alice a very expensive case of wine as an extra thank-you on top of her commission, then has contractors work the house over again and again until he decides he likes it.

When he moves in to the house in March, it’s much harder than the first time. He has to get an actual truck, surprising himself with how much junk he’s accumulated. There are cardboard boxes in every room of the house, and Sid doesn’t have the time to unpack right away. He does a little bit every day, cracking open a box of kitchen utensils he accidentally stored in his office, or finding his puck collection in the shower of the guest bathroom.

He doesn’t have to buy as many things this time. He forgoes ridiculous modern art in favor of hanging the team picture from the Stanley Cup over his fireplace. He frames family photos and rests them on all his shelves. He leaves his signed jerseys and sticks out in the open, wherever they don’t look like clutter.

“I think you’re really starting to build a home, Sid,” Duper smiles as Sid tours his family around the place before they all sit down to dinner together. His kids had been thrilled about the pool, though it still gets below freezing at night and Sid has it emptied for now. He’ll let them loose on the media room later to shatter his scores on all his video games.  Duper loops an arm around Sid’s shoulder, the other tucked around Carol-Lyne’s waist. “It’s a big place to have all to yourself, though.”

Sid shrugs. “It’s nice to have space, sometimes.” It’s not that he always enjoys spending his nights alone, and a lot of the food in his fridge goes bad because no one is around to eat it, but he really loves this place he’s built for himself. He loves the antique walnut walls, and the dove grey and ivory furniture, and all the variety of spaces he can fill with teammates and their loved ones at parties. His guest suite is decorated with Nova Scotian memorabilia and he has a big, beautiful yard.

It’s his home.

* * *

 They have to scramble for a playoff spot last-minute, losing more than winning near the end of the season, and then they’re lined up against the Rangers for the first round. Something about it smacks of bad luck.

People make fun of Sid for his superstitions and hang-ups about routine and repetition, but no one’s laughing when they fuck it up again.

Sid heads straight for World’s.

Prague is cathartic, in a way. The city is gorgeous, rich with history that enchants Sid whenever he spares a glance around at the art and architecture. Every time he plays for the national team, it’s different. This year it’s a team comprised almost entirely of guys who didn’t make it to the playoffs at all, and there’s a kind of camaraderie in that. They work their asses off, tallying goals with pride, and it seems like they can’t lose. Team Canada scores ten goals in a game _twice_ and Sid is definitely into that. They play hard and they party hard, and Sid is having a lot of fun.

That’s an understatement, perhaps. They enter the playoff round with a goal shy of fifty in just seven games. Sid doesn’t actually jerk off over stat sheets like some might suggest, but he definitely _could_ with those numbers. It feels fantastic after the year he’s had.

He keeps an eye on Russia, of course. He finds himself rooting for the team, a little bit, the way all Canadian hockey fans do at a national tournament, hoping for another historic match-up. Sid’s reasons for watching are maybe a little different. He’s not sure whether he wants to play against Geno or not, but in the end, it won't be his choice.

They shut out Belarus. They shut out the Czech Republic. Then it’s time for the gold medal game.

They’re slated to compete against Russia.

Sid is determined to win. He’s on a team with a streak and he has faith that they’re the unstoppable freight train thundering through the glacier that was his terrible season.

In the first period, they score with less than two minutes to go. Sid takes it as a good omen.

During the second, they get three more goals, one of which belongs to Sid, elevated over Bobrovski’s dipped shoulder. It’s four to nothing, now, and Sid wouldn’t mind the third shutout, though he scarcely wishes for it.

Russia collects penalties, but no points. By the time Nate scores their sixth halfway into the third period, Sid gets a little giddy. He forces his energy into professionalism and plays his hockey, but they’re going to _win_. He’s going to actually do something useful with his year.

Geno’s linemate Mozyakin shoots for the net, and the puck bounces off Geno’s skate and over the line. He gets the credit for the redirect, but it’s too little, too late. Canada wins the gold.

They guys all grapple in a clustered celly at the net, grinning, sweating, and hollering. It’s more hearty back slaps at one time than Sid has received since last year. The guys slowly move towards center ice and stand eagerly through the ceremony. It’s hard to look at the Russian team, the way their mouths all set in the same pressed line of determination and disappointment. Sid makes himself look in their eyes when the Russians are medalled in silver and move through the handshakes, at least the ones who don’t stare moodily past his head.

Geno grasps his hand, their thumbs interlocking and palms brushing in a way that’s far too friendly for temporary international foes. “Play good,” Geno says, and there’s something in his expression that Sid doesn’t quite comprehend. It’s warmer than he thinks he deserves right now.

“You too,” Sid replies, and Geno’s eyes dim at that, the corners drooping.

Then Geno hugs him, just briefly, one arm, and skates away to shake the next hand.

The ceremony continues, and soon enough there’s a trophy in Sid’s hands, gold confetti fluttering down onto the ice, the anthem playing, Sid’s countrymen all around him. There’s a whole lot of champagne and beer.

“Triple _gold_ , baby!” Seguin shakes his shoulders in the locker room, and Sid rarely has seen someone so quickly and cheerfully drunk. The rest of the room erupts in another cheer.

Sid, as the captain, dutifully pours drinks into the mouths of anyone who wants it, and takes his own overflowing mouthful from Spezza. Everyone is in various stages of undress. They should probably take things back to the hotel, but there’s no rush. Sid isn’t ready to settle into anything less than effervescent pride.

“Hey, Sid,” Brent Burns jerks his thumb towards the door while Sid contemplates a second beer from the cooler. “You’ve got a Russian outside.”

“Uh, thanks,” Sid says, and he knows it’s Geno—or, well, he hopes it’s Geno. He doesn’t really think he can manage Ovechkin or Kovalchuk while he’s tipsy.

Geno is in a Team Russia tracksuit, freshly showered and looking pretty good. Sid wonders if Geno will be at least slightly pleased with his silver in a few weeks. He knows he’s not exactly sober at the moment, but there’s a <i>lot</i> Sid would do to try and make Geno feel better about it, and none of it is appropriate for the hallway.

“We don’t talk much after Rangers,” Geno says, and fuck, Sid isn’t ready to think about their playoff failings just yet. Geno must sense his reluctance, because he says, “No, I’m not talk about _that_. I just want to say have good summer.”

“Oh,” and that’s much better, “You too. Next year, I _swear_. I’m so sick of not getting it. We've been waiting too long for the Cup.”

“Just play next game, yes?” Geno smiles, and Sid nods emphatically. “One more thing I want say. If I’m not win gold, then I’m glad it’s you.” He licks his lips and then swallows, “When you win, I’m proud. When you win, it’s like I’m win, little bit.”

Geno waits for Sid to contribute something to the conversation, but Sid can’t open his mouth.

There’s nothing he can say because Geno is standing there, with his hands in his pockets, head angled to look at Sid, the fluorescent lighting anything but flattering, promising in no exact words that the bond they share is more valuable than success, and Sid loves him.

“So, okay, see you in Pittsburgh,” Geno laughs to hide his nervousness, and goes to turn away. So Sid has to catch his wrist before he leaves.

“Yeah, uh,” Sid says, and he feels almost nauseous with the rush of feeling, “See you soon.”

Geno moves in, and does the handshake that they do before they walk out for a game, bumping Sid’s fist, his chest, his forehead. “Bye, Sid.”

* * *

 Sid loves Geno, and there’s a lot to think about when he goes home.

This August, Sid is turning _twenty-eight_. His summer is completely stacked with activities. He’s got interviews, and appearances, and weddings, and his new hockey school. It’s overwhelming because the NHL playoffs are still going and in another world, Sid wouldn’t even be back in Nova Scotia yet. He has no free time. There are business meetings and papers to sign, and everyone makes it pretty clear that he's merely taking care of the stuff that everyone else does _for_ him while he normally continues through the playoffs.

“Arguably, you’re in pretty good shape this year,” Andy says as he outlines the summer plan at Sid’s dining room table. “No major injuries means you don’t have to rehab anything.”

“How do you feel about Nate MacKinnon?” Sid asks, thinking of how Nate offered to help with the hockey school, and how well he played at World’s.

Thankfully, Andy catches on right away. “I’d say some friendly one-on-one competition would serve you well, as long as you both don't hurt yourselves trying to beat each other."

It helps that Sid can race Nate when he does cardio, because then Sid can win. Nate’s a good kid—hates to lose, curses a blue streak when Sid outperforms him in Andy’s exercises, but still mows the lawns of three elderly couples on his parents’ block every weekend.  Sid had heard others assess him as quiet and standoffish. He quickly appreciates that it’s a symptom of hockey-minded focus, because now that he's warmed up to Sid, Nate is kind of dorky and really good at keeping the mood light.

Sid flies to Montreal in July for Tanger’s wedding. He was going to take Taylor as his plus-one, but they run into scheduling conflicts and so he goes alone. It’s not as bad being on his own as he expects.He finds that he’s enjoying himself, though he still would rather that Geno was here alongside. More than once, Catherine dumps Alex into Sid’s arms when she and Tanger have wedding duties to attend to. Alex is definitely too squirmy for the formality of a wedding. Sid privately thinks he needs another nap.

It’s fine that Sid is the single guy tasked with childcare. He likes hanging out with his teammates’ kids. He’d enjoy it more with someone else, though.

“ _What am I going to do, eh?_ ” He asks Alex in French, who doesn’t mind how pedestrian his phrasing has come to sound over the years. “ _How am I going to figure this out?_ ” Alex has a soother in his mouth, and doesn’t respond. So Sid takes a picture of Alex in his smart little suit and sends it to Geno, who replies with an emoji of a top hat and a baby.

Sid’s hockey camp goes well, even though he worries every day leading up to it that the parents will suddenly decide they don’t want their kids learning from him. Instead, he’s delighted by a huge group of children, some of whom don’t even know who he is, all eager to learn about hockey and nothing else. They make mistakes, tumble, fall, and fail, but they bounce back because they love the game. Sid doesn’t think he inspires the kids nearly as much as they inspire him.

Some of them call him Coach Crosby, and he can feel himself adopting that moniker as easy as opening a window to let in the breeze.

Mostly, though, Sid doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing. He has his birthday and feels _old_. It’s been a decade that he’s spent playing in the NHL—is that all the success he gets to have?

He can’t sleep at night even when he’s exhausted from a busy day. He thinks about hockey, and life, but he also thinks about Geno. They’re both old now. Sid can’t do the flippant fucks anymore and it’s not even what he wants. He needs something bigger, more meaningful, and he thinks that maybe Geno feels the same way, but what if he doesn’t?

The first time, Sid was stupid. He didn’t think anything through. If he wants a _relationship_ with Geno, there’s a lot more to fear. Even if Sid were to ask and Geno were to say yes, there’s still a hundred things to worry about. Sid is—

He’s not gay. He’s liked girls and slept with them. He’s something else, he thinks, but he’s not about to share that with the rest of the world. Sid doesn’t want to be defined by who he loves, no matter how important that love is to him personally. To be the You Can Play poster boy—to have his entire career shoved beneath the title of “First Queer Player”—would kill him. It’s nobody’s business but his. It doesn’t affect how he plays, and he doesn’t want anyone to make the assumption that it does. He plays the way he does because he puts in the time. End of story.

Geno has more to risk than even that. He doesn’t want to be the reason Geno loses his home. He wants to be a safe haven, not a gamble with Geno's safety.

Sid thinks about all of that, running circles in his head while the clock ticks long past midnight, but when all of the musing has run its course, Sid can only think of Geno, Geno, Geno.

He wants to be near to Geno, to feel his heartbeat beneath his palm and the press of his lips; things they had before and things they’ve yet to try. He can barely wait for it. He’s more afraid than he’s ever been except maybe draft day. He’s more excited than he’s been since the Cup.

* * *

 Sid gets back into Pittsburgh and finds that it’s a joy to be back in his new house. He ponders a pool table as he strolls back from dinner with the Lemieux family. Maybe he should call his landscaper to put in new shrubs around his front sidewalk, too. Even so, with all that he could still add to the place, he’s comfortable here.

He’s just finishing unpacking from Canada when his phone rings. It’s Geno’s name and face that pop up, and Sid’s heart races with anticipation.

He chastises himself. It’s only Geno. Sid might have had some pretty big revelations, but Geno is still a coworker and a friend. He answers. “Hey, Geno.”

“Sid,” Geno says, voice tinny and exhausted, but still threaded through with contentment. “I’m back for camp.”

They shoot the shit for a while. Geno talks about his vacation and Sid prattles on about how in the hell they’re going to make it all work this year. Something’s gotta give, and it’s not going to be them. They’ll get through it, no matter what. “I swear to God, if I get told to make shorter passes again, I’m going to have to keep taking all my shots at the blue line.”

“If anyone say I’m not fight for you,” Geno offers, “I’m take the scratch and do anyways.”

“You will not,” Sid says sharply, but laughs all the same.

Geno’s responding laughter burbles in Sid’s ear, and he feels like he’s floating on it. This year will be great, he knows. What can go wrong when Geno is with him?

So he can’t hold it back. It’s a risk, but he has to say it. It’s bursting out of him like sunshine.

He catches his breath, and then says, “Geno?”

“Yes?”

“I love you,” Sid swallows past his dry throat. His hands are shaking. “I’m in love with you.”

There’s a tense silence on the other end. Sid doesn’t dare breathe. The world could come crashing down in hellfire and Sid would hardly notice. He just waits.

And then Geno hangs up on him.

  



	10. the shore

Oh, God. _Oh, God_.

He fucked it up—catastrophically and irreparably.

Somehow he ends up sitting on the floor, not knowing how he got there. He looks, and his phone is on the other side of the room, screen shattered, the spider’s web of it blinking up at him. Time slithers away. The sun, bright and orange, pierces his eyes as it descends in the sky. Sid feels the darkness crawling across the West, inevitable and coming straight towards him. He stares at his empty hands. He stares at the wood grain of his coffee table. He stares at the wall. He stares inside himself at his stupid, eager, soft heart and curses his impulsivity.

His phone has been ringing, he thinks. The cell phone, mostly, lighting up periodically across the room, but his landline has been tolling, too.

It feels like he’s underwater, drowning in slow motion, alternating between dread and hurt and panic. He can’t focus one moment, and the next he has startling, crystalline clarity.

Why’d he do it? What the hell was he _thinking_?

He should get up, move, get on with the evening, get on with his _life_. Still, he remains rooted in place, the floor unforgiving beneath him.

The doorbell rings. It startles Sid, but he makes no motion to answer. Whoever it is will go away. He’s not home, anyways. He’s been shelled out. He feels nothing—not shame or fear.  All he can feel is the hot, tight skin over his cheeks and the shivering of his limbs and the soreness in his throat. Has he been crying?

“ _Sid!_ ”

Sid jolts and shrieks, scrambling away from the sudden banging at his sliding glass door. His butt skids across the floor.

He looks up, and Geno is standing there, red-faced, panting.

So then Geno has come to--what? To demand that Sid take back what he said? There’s no way that he can do that. What’s been said is out there now, and though he’s maybe ruined the best friendship he’s ever had and the best chemistry he’s had on a team, he doesn’t think any differently of Geno.

His love is true.

“Sid,” Geno half-yells from the other side of the glass, “let me in!”

Reluctantly, Sid rises to his feet. His legs don’t feel like his own as they carry him to Geno. He unlatches the door and slides it open. Sid means to say something, but he makes no sound.

Geno steps inside the house, his chest heaving, and doesn’t wait for Sid to back away. He gets right into Sid’s space, towering over him, and _now_ the fear shivers down Sid’s spine. Now he’s worried. He can’t take back what he said—he _won’t—_ but oh how he wishes he could. If only things could return to the way they were.

His voice shakes. “Fuck, Geno, I’m so sorry. I _shouldn’t_ have said what I said, but I—”  

“Sid,” Geno says softly. His eyes are warm. He doesn’t seem upset. “You mean what you say?”

Sid swallows. He won’t take it back. “Yes,” he says, almost a whisper. “Sorry.”

“When you say you love me on phone, I’m not know what to think, and then I hang up by accident. And then I try to call you back, but you don’t pick up. So I keep trying and trying, and then I just come here.”

“You didn’t have to,” Sid mutters. He didn’t need Geno to witness his breakdown. He tucks his chin to his chest.

“I think I do,” Geno says. “When I see you through window, you look like your whole life is ruin.”

“You hung up on me,” Sid tries to reason with himself, even if Geno is apparently feeling sympathy about it now that he’s seen what a mess Sid is. “Aren’t you angry?”

“Sid, no. Never.” He squeezes Sid’s arm. “Look at me, Sidney. Please?”

It takes Sid a moment. He doesn’t know what his face looks like—whether it’s blotchy red or his brow is furrowed in frustration—but slowly, he raises his head.  

Geno is beaming at him when he looks up, his smile brighter than the sun. “I love you, too.”

“Geno—”

“I love you _so much_.”

“You,” Sid pauses, because this time he hears it, “you what?”

“If you love me, too,” Geno puts his hands on Sid’s waist, “can I kiss you?”

“Yes,” Sid says, blinking as Geno leans down and— _oh_.

It feels—well—it feels _good_. Geno kisses him and he thinks he’s dreaming. He very well might be, except his knuckles ache from how he winds them into Geno’s shirt, pulling him closer with all his might. It feels like an age of emotion pouring out all at once, until Geno parts his lips, tilts his head, and tenders the kiss.

They draw away for air and Sid can’t help but blurt, “I love you.” Geno makes a quiet, hurt noise, and leans back in.

The next time they pull back, the look on Geno’s face is so awed, and Sid can barely stand it. He knows that expression already, and it fills him with such bursting joy that his heart can’t take it. “I think—” Geno starts to say.

“Tell me later,” Sid interrupts, and drags Geno’s lips back to his.

It’s dusk outside, the blue light coming through the window and shadowing the soft lines of Geno’s face.  Sid slides his hands beneath Geno’s shirt.  His skin is warm, smooth, and Sid feels Geno shudder under his palms. Geno breaks away and guides Sid backwards until they crash over the side of the couch.

Geno’s lips are so soft, his tongue so clever. He licks into Sid’s mouth and then draws away, teasing, like a flickering flame. He presses in, and in, and soon enough Sid just gives up and lets Geno ply him with deep kisses.

He’s being swept away, surely.

Sid shifts a little, and it becomes abundantly clear how turned on they both are. _God_ , he’s missed that. He arches his back to grind up against Geno, and delights when Geno groans into Sid’s mouth. Sid spreads his thighs so Geno slips into the cradle of his hips.

“You trouble,” Geno murmurs as he breaks away from the kiss.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Sid cants his hips up again.

Geno latches onto Sid’s neck--bites and sucks as Sid squirms up against him, trying to find the right angle for the friction they both need. He’s too impatient for rhythm, suddenly desperate, his heart racing and arousal coiling up tight in his abdomen. Geno grasps his hip and guides him into more measured thrusts.

“Yes,” Geno whispers, his breath fanning over the wet, stinging spot on Sid’s neck. “Can’t believe—Sid—”

“Come on,” Sid clasps Geno’s nape and brings their mouths to meet once more.

Sid comes in his pants, but so does Geno. He’s happy to lie beneath Geno’s weight, breathing together, running his hand slowly up and down Geno’s spine. Geno nuzzles the underside of Sid’s jaw for a long time, seeming to soak up the moment. Eventually, Sid has to kiss Geno again _just because he can_. He can kiss Geno as much as he wants. _Geno loves him back_.

He laughs and then Geno laughs too, bright and warm.

“I love you so much.”

Geno kisses him. “Say again.”

Sid smiles. “I love you, Geno.”

Geno sighs, sounding contented, and wriggles around on the couch until his head is pillowed on Sid’s chest, his arms squeezed beneath Sid’s back, their legs tangled together. “I’m happy.”

Sid smiles. “Me too.”

“I’m most happy, _ever_.”

“More happy than the Cup?”

Geno pinches his side. “Is different kind of happy, Sid.”

Sid wants to kiss more, but he also doesn’t want to move. The couch is ridiculously uncomfortable and yet he feels like he could stay cuddled up on it for the rest of his life. “I want you to be happy. More than anything.”

“You love me.”

“I do.” Sid grins.

“I love you, too.”

Eventually, they sit up, but Sid doesn’t let Geno leave. “Stay with me?” He asks, and is pleased it doesn’t come out of his mouth as a beg.

“Not going anywhere,” Geno promises and kisses him.  Sid almost gets lost in it _again_.

“Actually, could we maybe go somewhere?” He strokes his thumb over Geno’s cheekbone, marvels at how Geno leans into his palm. “Like upstairs?”

“Yes, good plan.” They extract their tangle of limbs from each other. Sid has to lean against Geno a little as he stands, which he feels embarrassed about, but Geno just wraps an arm around his waist and doesn’t let him move even a few inches out of reach. Even going up the stairs, Geno holds his hand.

Sid’s room is clean after he’s completed his summer unpacking, except his suitcases are still open on the bed. He flings them away. They thump across the room, but they don’t sound broken.  He takes the opportunity of a clear bed to push Geno down onto it.

Geno grins up at him, the blush across his face betraying his attempts to appear calm and collected.  Sid loves him all the more for it. “Too many clothes,” Geno complains, and drags the hem of his own shirt up teasingly. The collar is stretched out from Sid yanking on it earlier.

“Oh yeah?” Sid unbuttons his pants and drags down the zipper, then pulls his shirt over his head. He strips and watches Geno slowly lose his composure. When he’s naked, he looks up and sees Geno’s hungry expression staring back at him. “Now _you’re_ overdressed.” Sid kneels on the bed, looming over Geno. “Come on, hurry up.”

But instead of getting out of his clothes, Geno lays a reverent hand on Sid’s hip. “You so beautiful. I’m lucky guy.”

Sid flushes. “Flattery will get you nowhere.”

“No?” Geno leans forward and brushes his lips across Sid’s stomach teasingly, and Sid’s cock jumps at the attention so close to where he wants it.

“Okay fine,” Sid admits, “I lied.”

Geno smirks, bends, and then takes the half-hard head of Sid’s cock into his mouth.

“Shit,” Sid hisses, grabbing at Geno’s shoulder for balance and somehow managing not to thrust forward. Then, just as suddenly, Geno pulls away, taking the sweet heat of his mouth with him. “Don’t stop,” Sid whines. “Why’d you stop?”

“Overdressed,” Geno says simply. He leans back and starts shimmying out of his pants. He winces when he peels off his underwear, and Sid can see where his come has stuck the fabric to his skin. He can’t bring himself to be grossed out about it—only proud and turned-on.

When Geno is undressed, he maneuvers Sid to lie on his back, and for a moment, Sid thinks they’re just going to rub off on each other again. But then Geno slides down the bed and with his forearm held firmly across Sid’s hips, he swallows Sid down. All the way down.

“ _Geno, fuck_ ,” Sid wails, because everything is hot and wet, and he stiffens to full hardness right in Geno’s mouth, in his _throat_. He curls his fingers into Geno’s hair, and then lets go and grabs the duvet, all the while squirming.  He’s unsure if he wants more or less, but the grip over his hips prevents him from doing anything at all.

Geno can’t stay with Sid’s dick in his throat for long. He pulls up, drooling. “I miss your cock so much,” Geno says. His lips are shiny.

“Don’t you miss my—” but Sid can’t finish his thought because Geno slides down again. Sid shouts wordlessly.

After he repeats the motion a few times more, Geno rests his forehead against Sid’s inner thigh, panting and gasping for breath. Sid’s chest is heaving, too, and he leans up on his elbows to look at Geno. He thinks he sees tears glittering among Geno’s eyelashes, but it’s his _mouth—_ cherry-red and slick—that causes Sid to collapse back onto the bed with a groan.

“You have to slow down,” Sid says. Or this will be over faster than dry humping on the couch. “Fuck, how are you _doing_ this?”

“Practice.” Geno’s voice tickles his skin. “Have toys. I think about you and try to be best, just in case.”

“ _Christ_.” Sid pictures it: Geno teaching himself to slide a cock into his throat, and maybe jerking himself off at the same time.  He imagines Geno getting sloppy with it, maybe getting a little frustrated when he can’t get quite as deep as he wants to.  He thinks about Geno smiling that big, shit-eating smile once he finally figures out how to touch his lips to the base.

“And then sometimes I do because I like so much.” He pauses in thought, and then—devastatingly—licks his lips and swallows. “Still need to try more. Have best cock to practice with now.”

“Uh,” Sid stutters, “No need. I think you’ve already killed me.”

“Not yet,” Geno huffs, and without warning sucks Sid down.

“Wait, _wait_ ,” Sid yelps and pushes Geno’s head up. Geno glares at him. “Seriously, I’m going to come in like, three seconds if you keep that up.”

“What if I want you come in three seconds?”

Sid shudders at the heat in Geno’s eyes. He doesn’t doubt that Geno could actually make it happen. “Well, I want it to last.”

Geno seems to take that into consideration for a moment, and then he must agree, because rather than murder Sid directly with his mouth, he starts to stroke with his hand.

He keeps his grip tight, and everything is still slick with spit. Now that he’s let go of Sid’s hips, Sid can’t help himself from thrusting up into the circle of Geno’s fingers. Every time his cockhead pops through the top, Geno takes a lick. It’s a different kind of torture, but at least Sid can control the pace and not completely embarrass himself.

“God, Geno,” Sid babbles, “Fuck, that’s so good.” He sighs, and then groans when Geno uses his other hand to cup Sid’s balls.

“Enough yet?” Geno asks as he jacks Sid’s cock.

“Never enough.  I don’t want it to stop.” Geno scoffs, so Sid drags a hand through his hair. “You’re amazing.”

Geno bars his arm across Sid’s hips again. This time, though, he bobs his head down Sid’s cock.  He’s careful and measured, but still dripping spit down the length. He works his way down until his lips are around the base, and then sucks hard as he draws all the way off, pulling away with a _pop_. Then he repeats the motion.

Without thinking about it, Sid murmurs, “More.” And so Geno does, sucking harder, stroking with his tongue as he slides down.

Heat bubbles up inside Sid, slow but inevitable. All it takes is Geno brushing two fingers against his hole, and he comes down Geno’s throat without warning, shouting as Geno sucks greedily.

“Come up,” Sid gasps as Geno slides his mouth away painfully slow, still sucking. “Come up here. Geno.” He needs to kiss him. _Has_ to. “Please, just—”

It’s a good thing Geno can read his mind. Geno surges up and captures Sid’s mouth in a kiss, lets Sid lick away the taste of himself, and lays his weight down over Sid’s body. He’s flushed warm, hard against Sid’s thigh. “So nice,” Geno smiles into their kiss, his voice rough.

Sid sighs. “That was fantastic.”

“Best ever?”

He thinks about it, because it was certainly _one_ of the best. There’s a lot of history to wade through, and it’s difficult to pick.

Geno frowns. “Room for improvement.”

Sid kisses Geno to placate him. “More like, I need to work on my stamina.”

That just makes Geno’s frown deepen. “I like how you’re fast.” He grinds his dick against Sid’s thigh. “So hot,” he whispers in Sid’s ear.  

“Okay, okay,” Sid rolls them until he’s on top. “Please let me suck you off now.”

“Not gonna say no.”

Sid wiggles down Geno’s body until his face is finally level with Geno’s cock. He’s not going to be able to go as deep as Geno can, but he’s delighted to find that Geno still leaks as much as before, and he ducks his head to lick away the flavour. Geno releases a litany of praiseful noises as Sid mouths over his cock, tongues the slit, suckles beneath the head. He’s suddenly caught up in the need to prove to Geno just how much he’s enamoured with him.

He eases his weight off Geno’s thighs until he has the room to nudge into Sid’s mouth. And he does, a little bit, gradually losing himself and taking what he needs. Sid relaxes his jaw and lets Geno make his tiny thrusts, laving his tongue over the shaft encouragingly. It’s still not enough, though. Sid wants to _take_ it. He thinks he could wedge Geno’s thick cock in the back of his mouth if Geno would just flex his hips and shove in.

“Hey Geno,” Sid says, jacking Geno’s cock. Geno is staring down at him, eyes wide and lips parted. “Fuck my mouth.”

Geno’s come hits the underside of Sid’s chin, surprising them both. Sid seals his mouth over the head of Geno’s cock to suck him through his orgasm, but he only does it in time for the last dribble.

“See? I’m faster than you.” Geno sounds absolutely wrecked, and Sid grins as he moves back up beside him.

Sid thinks they’re going to stay there for a while, Geno with his arms around Sid, both of them practically purring with contentment, trading kisses like they have nothing to worry about. Except the world carries on around them, because it’s not too long before Geno’s stomach rumbles audibly.

“You hungry?” Sid asks with a laugh.

Geno sighs and pats his own stomach. “I’m just making late dinner when I call you.”

“I don’t have much in my fridge.” He does an inventory in his head. “Actually, I don’t think I have _anything_ in my fridge. I haven’t been to the grocery store yet. We can order something, if you want.” He’s still not ready to let Geno leave.

“Pizza?” Geno suggests, and Sid purses his lips. He feels too _good_ for pizza. “Okay, pasta.”

Sid ducks his head. “Well, there’s this gnocchi I’ve been meaning to try.”

Geno flaps his hand towards the end of the bed. “Phone in jeans. Get for me?”

Sid rolls his eyes and leans across Geno’s body for the house phone on his bedside table.  He dials the number by heart. The girl on the other end welcomes him back to town and asks if he wants his usual: a fettuccine _aglio e olio_ with chicken. He blushes, a little embarrassed at his predictability, but instead orders the sweet potato gnocchi, and then the lemon-artichoke pesto with shrimp for Geno.

“Best,” Geno murmurs, and kisses Sid’s cheek.

“Mm hm,” Sid turns his face so Geno can kiss his mouth instead. Geno obliges with a smile.

* * *

The food arrives in just under an hour, by which time Geno is bordering on grumpy, only held in check because Sid showers him with kisses. He lets Geno suck marks onto his collarbones, and he almost has five when the doorbell rings.

They eat at the table, because although Sid is gloriously happy, he has _rules_.

Geno steals about half of his gnocchi, but Sid allows it because he’s not especially hungry. He’s just happy to watch Geno miss his mouth with the fork time and time again, too busy staring at Sid to pay attention to what he’s doing. Sid runs his foot up Geno’s bare calf, trying to distract him further. Geno had to borrow some of Sid’s underwear because his own were dirty, and the boxers are just a little big on him. It’s a _great_ look. Sid would happily outfit Geno in his clothes all the time, if his clothes weren’t mostly just Penguins-branded athletic wear and a selection of cool-neutral henleys.

“You’re so cute,” Sid says, and then feels himself go furiously red. “Uh, I mean—”

“You cuter,” Geno replies, but then he’s blushing too.

“It’s not a competition.”

“Okay, but I’m still say you’re winning.” He steals another piece of pasta, drops it into his own container to swirl it around in the extra sauce.

Eventually Geno has his fill of carbs. They dump their containers in the garbage and put utensils into the dishwasher. At Sid’s request, Geno follows Sid back up to the bedroom and crawls beneath the covers with him.

Kissing is definitely still a novelty, but Sid is starting to get the hang of kissing _Geno_. He learns that if he’s teasing enough, Geno will suck his tongue. If he peppers Geno’s face with tiny, pecking kisses, then Geno will hold his jaw and kiss him slow, deep, full. And he’s also discovering that he _really_ likes it when Geno does that. It’s overwhelming, but in the best way.

There’s no urgency as they make out, wrapped cozily around each other. It’s kind of perfect. Sid’s kind of disappointed that he’s been missing out on it for _years_.

Geno leans back and says something to Sid in Russian, smiling, and kisses him again.

“What’s that mean?” Sid asks.

“It’s mean I love you very much.” He rubs a hand over Sid’s hip.

Sid leans into the touch a little, but then catches Geno’s hand and links their fingers together. “You used to say that to me all the time. When we,” He pauses, licks his lips, “You know.”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

Geno waits for so long to respond that Sid thinks he might have to clarify: _How long have you known that you love me?_ But luckily Geno does understand him. “Not sure. Maybe when we lose Cup? Or after Olympics, when you’re talk to me? Every time you get hurt and I can’t help?” He shrugs, only barely uneasy. “Maybe it’s when I first see you in Mario’s front door. It’s long time and very complicated—can’t remember exact moment.”

Sid looks down at their joined hands. After a while, he says, “I’m sorry.”

“Why sorry?”

He doesn’t know how to answer that, because he’s sorry about so many things. Instead, he says, “Will you tell me about it? What it was like for you? We never talked about anything.”

Geno sighs and rolls away a bit. He stares at the ceiling, but at least he doesn’t let go of Sid’s hand.

It takes Geno a long time to reply, but Sid waits. He needs to know Geno’s side of things.

“When we first start—fucking,” Geno says, and twists his lips at the words, “I think it’s fun, and you’re so good at hockey, and try so hard to please me, I’m just happy. All I want is more. So I maybe try new things. I try things that I never do before, you know? And I just want you to feel like you have best sex with _me_ , and only me, and I don’t understand why for a bit. Then, I understand it’s because you’re most important to me, and I want you in my life always, but I still don’t understand. Not really.

“After you get concussion and I injure ACL, MCL, I wonder what I’m _doing_ , be with you but can’t _be_ with you. So I say let’s stop.” Sid squeezes Geno’s hand, but that just makes Geno pull away. “I still want be friends. Then you’re mad because—I don’t know. And then _I’m_ mad because you won’t try make our friendship work and I _miss_ you.

“Except I realize I’m not just miss you like sexy, fun you who tries so hard to make me feel good, but I’m miss _real_ you, who I’m never even meet. I’m miss you who care about me and want to be with me because you never show it to me. And then you want to be friends but don’t want sex, and I think, okay, is enough for me.

“So I try do good things for you, and—and _be_ there. But I don’t know until after Olympics, when you’re so gentle with me, and tell me it’s okay, and that I’m still good. I don’t know that it’s me who needs _you_.”

Geno sniffles, wipes the back of his hand across his eyes, but a tear falls anyways and rolls slowly down his cheek. Sid tries to assemble his thoughts as emotion quivers through Geno. He pulls Geno into his side. Geno tucks himself up, his hair tickling the underside of Sid’s chin.

Sid thinks he’s been pretty oblivious. He’d recognized some of Geno’s feelings over the years. He’d noticed the way Geno’s gaze lingered, or the soft, gentle way he’d smiled sometimes, and he’d always turned away from it. He hadn’t known the _extent_ of it, though.

The alarm clock on Sid’s bedside table reads that it’s getting really late. He feels both wide awake and impossibly exhausted.

“I’m sorry I didn’t realize,” Sid says eventually. “I should have…” He trails off because it wouldn’t be fair to say that if he’d _noticed_ it would have made any difference. Perhaps it would have been even worse if he was aware of just how much Geno cared about him. Sid probably would have done something unforgivable in response. “I wish I had figured out my own stuff sooner.”

Geno slides himself more comfortably around Sid, one arm thrown over his hip, his legs slipping into the spaces between Sid’s. “I’m so happy you figure it out _now_.”

“I didn’t realize it until after World’s, but I think,” and he grimaces, grateful that Geno isn’t looking in his eyes right now, “I’ve probably loved you for years and just didn’t know. Maybe since the Cup?”

“Why World’s?” Geno asks.

“When you told me that my wins are your wins.” He still can’t really believe Geno said that to him after an international loss. It makes his heart clench with affection. He hopes he can be just as devoted to Geno’s success.

“If we’re together, then we win everything,” Geno says. He kisses the skin he can reach--Sid’s throat, the join between neck and shoulder, his collarbones which are still tender from Geno’s marking. “Get another Cup this year, I promise.”

“Uh,” Sid says, “pretty sure that’s what I promised _you_. So—”

“It’s okay. We get it for each other.”

* * *

Sid wakes up mid-morning to the movement of Geno crawling back into bed.

They drifted apart a bit in the night, but still kept contact. Sid woke once during the night and realized Geno’s ankle was hooked around his, even as he wheezed slightly in his sleep on the other side of the bed, and Sid floated on a great big swell of affection as he drifted back into darkness. Now, as Geno realizes Sid is awake, he slides over top of him, making contact with every bit of bare skin as he goes, until they’re face-to-face.  

“Hi,” Sid kind of gurgles, his voice distorted and heavy from a really good night’s sleep.

Geno kisses his cheek. “Good morning.”

“Yeah,” Sid smiles, “it is.”

Geno keeps kissing him—all over his face and neck—and meanwhile he shifts against Sid’s thigh in a way that is not subtle at all. “I like kissing you,” Geno says, as if it weren’t becoming rapidly obvious.

“Oh? Is that _all_ you like?”

“I like everything.”

Sid makes a concerted effort to talk about the way things are going to go—to ask Geno what he wants—before he winds up rolling on top of Geno to suck his dick until he’s spent and speechless. “So what would you like right now?”  

“I think,” Geno says between pecks along Sid’s jaw, “that you take off clothes and fuck me.” He spreads his legs, straddling Sid’s hips and pressing their erections together. “I’m already stretch,” he purrs, boxing his arms around Sid’s head and leaning in, his breath hot, “so go ahead.”

There’s no stopping the needy whine that Sid makes. He’d never even considered it, even after Geno’s confession the night before about how he had _practiced_ for Sid. Sid had assumed he’d be the one to yield and Geno would fuck him. But the idea of pushing inside Geno _instead_ is just— _God_.

“Good?” Geno asks, maybe a little nervously, because Sid has been gaping like a fish out of water for too long.

“Yes, fuck,” the words come out rough, “please. Please, Geno.”

Geno rubs against him a little more. “Yeah?” Sid grasps Geno’s ass. The muscle is too much for him to hold, but he squeezes Geno’s generous backside, not sure if he should stop Geno from grinding or encourage him to keep going.

“Hold on,” Sid says after a moment, “I need—” he pushes Geno off and to the side, and then rolls toward his bedside table, “Uh, it’s in here somewhere,” he roots around, his fingers close on the bottle, and finally his mouth catches up with his brain: “Lube, there we go.” He finds a condom, too.

When he turns back, Geno is kicking his borrowed boxers off his legs. His cock is flushed and hard.

“You look amazing,” Sid can’t help but blurt.

Geno rolls his eyes, but smiles. “Then fuck me.”

Sid kisses Geno some more, because he wants to, and he can. Then he opens the lube and squeezes some onto his fingers. He nudges Geno’s leg up over his hip, and then brushes his wet fingertips over Geno’s hole. He doesn’t know what he’s expecting. It feels like an asshole, but still his heart swells to realize that Geno wants this. He wants Sid to have his vulnerabilities and trusts Sid to make him feel good, even though he almost never knows what he’s doing when it comes to this.

He slips his index finger in to the first knuckle. It’s so warm inside, and not as tight as he might expect, but still Geno is clinging to him. He pulls out, adds a little more lube. It feels like Geno is pulling him in. His body is practically _inviting_ him.

“I tell you I’m stretch before,” Geno grumbles, shifting his weight so that he opens even further and Sid’s finger slips all the way in.

Sid doesn’t want to belittle Geno’s desire and impatience by mentioning the size difference between his finger and his dick, so what he says instead is, “I just want to take my time with you.”

It does the trick, and Geno blushes sweetly. “Do two, at least.”

With two fingers inside him, Geno becomes a needy thing. His hips are restless and his hands trail over Sid’s skin. Sid twists his fingers and rotates his wrist, trying to stretch the clenching muscles, dipping in and out and spreading. He turns his wrist a certain way, and Geno _jolts_ against him and then shudders. He tucks his face into a pillow.

“What?” Sid asks, and tries to pull out, but Geno clamps down _hard_. “G, what’s wrong?”

He mumbles something into the pillow, which sounds like an encouragement, but Sid can’t be sure.

“Do you want me to stop?”

Geno smacks him, mostly missing, and this time he says, “Do it again.”

Sid tries. He _tries_ , but he’s lost the angle now. He twists his fingers and seems to miss the mark every time. Geno is thrusting back on his fingers now, too, which is not exactly helping. “Stay still,” Sid tells him. It takes several slow, patient kisses before Geno calms down. Sid knows he’s got the angle right again when Geno yelps into his mouth. “There?” Sid asks against his lips.

“Yes,” Geno sighs, “Like that.”

This time, Sid knows how to hit the same spot. He brushes by it half a dozen times before Geno gets impatient again.

“Three, Sid, come on,” he demands, and Sid complies, slipping his ring finger along with the first two.

It’s _tight_ , then, and Sid feels like he is accessing new wells of patience he never knew he possessed. He goes slow until Geno loosens up around him. And then he has a new problem.

“Uh,” Sid says, “The condom—can you?” He won’t be able to open the wrapper with slippery fingers, which is not to mention how much he doesn’t want to leave Geno empty for even a moment if he doesn’t have to.

Geno huffs, but rips open the condom package and then rolls it quickly onto Sid’s dick. “There,” Geno says, “Condom on. Now _fuck me_ , Sid.”

Sid takes one second to kiss Geno’s cheek, which is apparently too long, because Geno starts knocking at Sid’s shoulder until Sid falls onto his back. Geno is over him in the next breath, straddling his hips, bracing one hand on Sid’s chest and the other behind him on the base of Sid’s cock. He sinks an inch onto Sid before he halts, throws his head back, and moans.

“Holy shit,” Sid marvels, because Geno is still snug and it feels unreal.

Geno pushes down again, tighter all of the sudden, and any of the remaining blood that isn’t devoted to keeping Sid hard—harder than he thinks he’s ever been—is sent rushing to his head. The room kind of swirls for a second. Sid grabs onto Geno’s sides to stop him.

“Wait, wait!”

“Wait for _years_ ,” Geno complains, and stubbornly keeps trying to force more of Sid’s dick inside himself.

“Christ, Geno, _hold on_.” He thinks he could buck Geno off, but he still really, _really_ wants to never stop. “You’re going to pinch my dick off.”

That, at least, gives Geno pause. “More lube?”

“Maybe,” Sid admits, “Lemme—” He fumbles for the lube again while Geno eases up a bit. There’s lube on the condom, but it probably wasn’t enough. Sid slicks some more on himself, gently, because his control is fading fast and he wants to be able to last longer than it takes to get all the way inside.

It’s definitely better with more lube, and Sid manages to keep from thrusting up by stroking his hands over Geno’s marvelous thighs. Geno is so unbelievably hot. Everything about him, as Sid stares at him from below, is an athletic masterpiece. He might say as much, because Geno shushes him, his face growing red.

Finally, when Geno has lowered himself all the way down, he shifts his weight onto Sid’s lap. They both let out a gasp.

Geno pets across Sid’s chest, occasionally thumbing a nipple as Sid gets used to the clenching warmth all along the length of his cock. “Sorry,” Geno says after a while. “I like it little bit dry. Didn’t know it would hurt you.”

“It didn’t hurt,” Sid replies, still trying very hard not to come, and maybe he should be trying to distract himself so he doesn’t pop off before he can actually fuck Geno properly. “It was just a lot, you know?”

Geno hums. His cock isn’t as hard anymore, and Sid hopes he can change that in a moment. “I ride you now?” He asks, and twitches his hips just enough for Sid to feel it.

“If you want me to come in like three seconds, yeah,” Sid finally admits.

With a cheeky grin and a glimmer in his eyes that does not bode well for Sid, Geno says, “But what if that’s what I’m want?”

And really, what can he do? Sid thinks, _fuck it._  He bucks his hips, and Geno’s smile disappears for the briefest second before he seems to realize he’s going to get his way. Sid wraps his hand around Geno’s cock, and says, “Then I better make sure you come first.”

Geno has never backed down from a challenge in all the time that Sid has known him. “You’re not last as long as me.” There will be plenty of time to go slow, but Sid can’t resist a challenge either.

Geno’s cock slips through Sid’s grasp as he rides Sid. It’s hard not to thrust up to meet him, and between the two of them they can’t quite get the rhythm right, but it doesn’t matter. They’re both desperate enough that anything feels amazing. All of it is so fucking hot.

Sid doesn’t win their brief, heated competition, but it’s not as if he _loses_ , either. He comes inside Geno with a shout and holds on for dear life, clutching Geno’s hips with both hands, trying to keep Geno still.  He squeezes his eyes shut against the smug look Geno gives him and the onslaught of emotions that brings. He strokes Geno fast and tight until he’s spilling all over, mostly across their stomachs, but a splash ends up in the center of Sid’s chest and another dribble rolls over Sid’s knuckles.

He wipes his wet hand on the sheets and carefully slips his sensitive, softening cock out of Geno. Geno winces in discomfort, but he doesn’t even let Sid tie off the condom before he’s collapsing on top and sighing noisily into Sid’s ear.

“Good?” Sid asks, because even though he knows the answer, he wants to hear Geno’s reply.

“Yes,” Geno says, “perfect.”

Sid frowns. There’s no room for improvement in ‘perfect.’

“Perfect for first time,” Geno corrects, as if he can read Sid’s thoughts.

“It’s not exactly the first time, though.”

“No one else do this for me.”

Sid sits up, pushing Geno upright like a sack of potatoes. He looks into Geno’s eyes, but only sees contentment there. “Nobody else has done _what_ for you?”

“Be inside me,” Geno says slowly, blinking as if Sid is being obtuse.

“Really?”

Geno kisses Sid on the forehead. “Yes, so is perfect first time. Why, you think I have other man who I like, who I trust this much?”

“Well, no,” Sid admits. He wraps his arms around Geno. “Thank you for trusting me, then.”

“And it’s also fun for me, very sexy. It’s not just trust. I’m have _very_ good time.”

Sid laughs a little. “Okay, well, me too.”

“I bet,” Geno smirks.

They’re both absolutely filthy, and in desperate need of a shower. Geno goes into the bathroom first, stretching his legs and hips as he does, shaking out the stiffness. Sid dumps his sheets into the laundry machine to deal with later, and then goes to join Geno.

He lathers up his hand with soap, and then touches the base of Geno’s spine gently. “Can I?” He asks, and Geno nods. So Sid slips his fingers between Geno’s cheeks and cleans away the mess of lube as carefully as he can, listening for any noises Geno might make to stop him.

With that done, he hands the shower gel to Geno and works on shampooing himself.

They manage to distract each other with kissing, which is something that Sid finds out that he really likes in the shower, because they can both get pretty sloppy with their tongues and the spit just washes away.

“Can’t fuck in shower,” Geno warns, even though Sid has kept his hands mostly to himself. “If you slip, break leg, it’s bad for team.”

Sid rolls his eyes. “I wouldn’t break my leg.”

“Sex injury, very embarrassing in locker room.”

“Then I’ll get a bench installed in here,” Sid mutters. They’ve _had_ sex in the shower before. Nobody got hurt.

“It’s not challenge, Sid.” Geno pecks the tip of his nose, which is both sweet and condescending. So Sid gives him a bit of a facewash.  It all devolves into a fit of giggles pretty quickly.

Geno is pretty particular about his hair, so Sid is out of the shower already when Geno is finishing up with the conditioner. “Hey,” Sid says above the noise of the shower as he towels himself dry, “is there anything you didn’t like? Can I do anything better?”

“No, I like everything, I tell you.”

Sid is still a bit irritated about it.  Geno may not want to fess up, but he knows that there must be _something_ he can fix. “Are you sure?”

The shower is turned off and Geno steps out. He’s dripping all over the floor, so Sid hands him a spare towel. “Less fingers,” Geno says, wrapping the towel around his waist, not caring at all about how much water is sloughing off of him and onto the tile.. If there’s a puddle on the locker room floor after a game, there’s a good chance that Geno left it there.

Sid narrows his eyes. “You seemed to really enjoy it.”

Geno sighs. “Yes, I like, but don’t need so much.”

“You can’t just take me dry, Geno. I’m pretty sure you have to warm up first.”

“If you use fingers a lot,” Geno says, “then I’m not last as long.”

Sid is definitely right about Geno liking it. “We can work on your stamina,” he offers.

“ _Both_ work.” And then Geno’s stomach growls. “Okay, breakfast now. No stamina at all if we don’t eat.”

There’s still nothing in Sid’s kitchen to eat, so Sid slips on some clothes that are passable for public consumption and some flip flops, and drives to McDonald’s to pick up breakfast. Geno tears into the brown paper bags when he gets back, going straight for the hashbrowns and leaving the yogurt for Sid.

Sid doesn’t know how their future will be. He knows he doesn’t have to clarify with Geno that hockey comes first. And hockey can’t really be extricated from their relationship, either. They work together, play together, sweat and bleed and battle together. Hockey is part of the reason he likes Geno. He can admit to himself that he’s turned on by the way Geno tears it up on the ice. He can admit that he’s come to love the way that Geno helps him lead the team.

He doesn’t want their relationship to be a big deal. It _is_ a big deal, of course, but he doesn’t want it to be something that defines how other people understand them. Is it selfish to want to keep it only between them?

“I don’t want to tell people, either,” Geno says, which is a relief.

“Maybe ever. At least—I mean it’s not that I’m not _proud_ of being with you, or that I don’t love you enough to make it public, or, or semi-public, but—”

Geno reaches across the table, and holds Sid’s hand. “It’s okay, Sid. What we have is just for us. And if we change our mind,” he shrugs, “then we talk about it.”

Eventually, Geno has to go back to his own house. He hasn’t finished unpacking yet. Sid has to go buy groceries. There’s half a dozen team obligations they both have before camp begins. They kiss at the door until Sid considers dragging Geno back to bed. He doesn’t have the energy to fuck Geno twice in one morning, but there are other things they could do.

Sid sighs, half frustrated, lips actually tingling. “Alright, you’ve got to go.”

“I’m not go far,” Geno says, pressing his palm to Sid’s chest, over his heart, and kisses him once more.

* * *

**Epilogue:**

The Cup is in his hands again, and it feels _right_.

Then he passes it off to his teammates.

Sid is floating up somewhere above his body even hours after the game is done. Luckily, Geno is still tethering him to Earth.

It was a tough season. Somehow they crawled out from the hole they’d found themselves in in December and clawed their way back to Lord Stanley’s shining chalice. Most of it still feels like a dream.

“I’m so proud of us,” Sid says, for what is probably the hundredth time. He’s proud of the team, the organization, the fans.  But he’s also proud of Geno, proud of having him, after all these years.  It’s some kind of miracle, if he stops and thinks about it. He’s never been happier.

“You say already,” Geno chides, but he’s also grinning the same champion’s grin.

They’re lying side by side in Geno’s hotel bed. It’s almost dawn and they’re barely touching, because despite the adrenaline and euphoria and considerable amounts of alcohol, the aches and pains of a long season are starting to set in. Geno is holding Sid’s hand by two fingers. They’re both laden with ice packs. They turned on the TV, and then couldn’t bother to change the channel. It’s been playing the hotel’s welcome message for the better part of an hour.

Sid shifts just slightly so he can watch the rise and fall of Geno’s chest.

They’re so fucking lucky.

To have each other, to have the Cup again, to have dreams come true.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Questions? Suggestions? [I'm here for you.](http://goodnightpuckbunny.tumblr.com)


End file.
